2025 NASCAR Championship Race Predictions and Odds for Phoenix (Nov. 2)

• Championship Chess: The top four will play nice for the trophy, but we’re hunting the cracks the sportsbooks won’t see.
• An Underdog Uprising: Which quiet performers are ready to crash the Top-10?
• Eyes on the Prize: Skip ahead and you miss the good stuff!

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We’ve made it to the desert, folks. The grand finale of the 2025 NASCAR season is here. The year’s been long, loud, and full of more emotional damage than Joey Logano’s credit card bill from his hair restoration clinic. I’ve written nearly a hundred columns this season; some sharp enough to slice Vegas lines in half, others that have aged like milk in the sun. But we don’t quit until the haulers are parked and the champagne’s flat.

So, let’s cash a few more NASCAR tickets together here in Phoenix, and maybe — just maybe — give the brain trust at SportsBettingDime a reason to bring us back for another lap in 2026.

NASCAR Championship Race Odds

*Odds available as of November 1, 2025 at 11:15am at Bet365 Sportsbook. Bet on NASCAR today with a Bet365 promo code. Missouri bettors should visit Bet365 Missouri ahead of the official launch.

Denny Hamlin enters Phoenix as the favorite at +320, which implies a win probability of about 23.8 percent. William Byron is right behind at +350, giving him an implied probability of roughly 22.2 percent. Kyle Larson checks in third at +400, translating to a 20 percent chance of taking the checkered flag.

Nascar Championship Predictions

Yes, fella. We actually did it. William Byron made us look like geniuses last weekend, winning from the pole, leading over 300 laps, and punching his ticket to the Championship 4. If you were following along, you’re holding a Kid Byron championship ticket at +2200. And if you did a little line shopping after the article dropped, you might have snagged +3000 at Caesars — because apparently the oddsmakers there were busy ordering lunch instead of doing math. Maybe you’ve got both. Either way, we salute you.

Kyle Larson also kept our reputation intact by cashing the plus-money top-five prop. He ran up front in both stages, stayed clean, and pointed his way into the finale. Christopher Bell, Joey Logano, Ryan Blaney, and Chase Elliott weren’t as lucky. Someone had to get their feelings hurt.

The field is set: Denny Hamlin, Chase Briscoe, William Byron, and Kyle Larson will battle for all the marbles on Sunday afternoon. We’ll have to suffer through a few quarters of NFL background noise until then, but we’ll make it work.

WILLIAM BYRON WINS AT MARTINSVILLE!

Denny Hamlin, Chase Briscoe, William Byron and Kyle Larson are your 2025 Championship 4! pic.twitter.com/v5kqsJ2abK

— FOX: NASCAR (@NASCARONFOX) October 26, 2025

Phoenix Raceway is a one-mile flat track with nine degrees of banking in Turns 1–2 and eleven in 3–4. The dogleg is pure chaos. It’s a place where drivers pretend lane boundaries are just polite suggestions. For instance, Corey Heim went bottom seven-wide there in the Truck Series finale on Friday night, pulled off an all-timer, and secured his championship. Tires wear, lap times fall off, pit crews matter, and bad strategy gets punished fast. It’s a weird place to decide a champion, but it’s never boring.

Denny Hamlin put his No. 11 wagon on the pole, a promising start in his endless quest for that elusive first title. Byron lines up beside him with Larson stalking from row two. Chase Briscoe, who captured seven poles this season, could only manage twelfth this time around. That should raise a few eyebrows inside the Joe Gibbs camp, especially since this team was on the pole for this race in 2024.

So, how do we make the sportsbooks pay one last time before the lights go out on the 2025 season?

Nascar Championship Picks

We say all of that to make one thing clear: we’re not betting on any of those guys. They’re priced out. The bookmakers know the field will basically treat the Championship Four with kid gloves — they’ve earned the right to decide the title amongst themselves. That means if we want to make money this weekend, we need to dig deeper.

Pheonix Top-10 Finish Picks

• Ross Chastain (+185, HardRock)
• Carson Hocevar (+220, Bet365)
• Chris Buescher (+300, Bet365)

Time to fire on these cats. There’s value all the way up the ladder — top-5, top-3, maybe even an outright win, though let’s be honest, that last one is mostly fantasy. But let’s not forget, Ross has already proven it can be done, taking this very race in 2023 as a non-playoff driver.

And the “Watermelon Man” was fast in practice, earning our top rating overall and reminding us that Trackhouse still knows how to put a fast car on the track…sometimes. Our predicted finishes for this trio you ask? Chastain 10.2, Hocevar 10.7, Buescher 11.8. None are under ten, but the plus-money payouts make all three worth a ticket.

Buescher, in particular, is a quietly steady play. Earlier this season in Phoenix, he posted the 11th-best green-flag speed en route to a top-five finish. At Gateway, he ranked tenth in green-flag speed. Last year at Phoenix, he put up ninth-best green-flag speeds in both events, finishing second in the spring. That’s the kind of under-the-radar consistency that books often ignore — which, of course, makes it exactly the spot we want to hit.