NASCAR gets started earlier than usual this weekend with a Saturday night race at Phoenix International Raceway, so bettors will have to make their picks and get their wagers down before the green flag drops.

I’ve been making my NASCAR picks this season based on previous winners at whatever track the Sprint Cup Series is racing at that weekend. You can tell how well that strategy has been working by my current position in my NASCAR fantasy league. That would be dead-last, by the way.

Last week in Texas, Carl Edwards continued his domination of shorter tracks with his third win of the season. Phoenix is another fairly short track, so I’ll be taking Edwards for my fantasy team and at 6/1 at .

I’m not ready to completely throw past results out the window, so I’m also taking a flyer on Kevin Harvick. So far this season Harvick has cracked the Top 15 in every race, but he’s still looking for his first victory. Harvick swept both races at Phoenix in 2006 and is definitely worth a bet this weekend at 15/1 at .

For anyone that’s wondering, Jeff Gordon won the Subway Fresh Fit 500 last season, and if he can do it again it would be his first win of the season and the first win for the Hendrick Motorsports outfit that was expected to be the team to beat this year.

Gordon and teammate Jimmie Johnson are both 6/1 favorites at , but I won’t be betting any money on them. That likely means one of them will win. You can check out a cool NASCAR handicapping tool here at PointSpread.com, called the head-to-head driver database. It compares how any two drivers have done against each other based on starting position, track, race and more. Check it out in the NASCAR betting pages.