Take it to bank: All bets are off in Vegas

The laws of probability still reign at the casinos here, but it’s now much harder to figure the odds at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

As NASCAR’s Nextel Cup drivers qualify today for the UAW-DaimlerChrysler 400, they’ll be racing on a track vastly different from the one where Jimmie Johnson won in 2005 and 2006, offering few clues as to who might have an edge Sunday.

The track’s owner, Bruton Smith’s Speedway Motorsports Inc., recently completed a multimillion-dollar overhaul of the 1.5-mile oval that included raising its corner banking to 20 degrees from 12.

That’s made the track much faster. When the Cup teams tested the new layout in January, several drivers turned laps averaging better than 185 mph, more than 10 mph faster than Kasey Kahne’s track qualifying record of 174.904 mph set in 2004.

There also were several crashes during the tests, prompting NASCAR to order that the cars’ fuel cells be reduced from 18 to 13 gallons for Sunday’s race.

The change will require more pit stops during the 267-lap, 400-mile race and thus allow NASCAR and the teams to better monitor tire wear for safety on the new, faster asphalt.

All of which heightens the uncertainty about Sunday’s race.

“It’s like being at a whole different place,” said veteran Sterling Marlin, who won the race in 2002 driving a Dodge for Chip Ganassi Racing. Marlin now drives the No. 14 Chevrolet for Ginn Racing.

“They’ve added a ton of banking, resurfaced the track and made teams go a whole lot faster,” he said. “It will be interesting to see how things shake out.”

Tony Stewart thinks he knows what will shake out. The 2005 title winner contends that the new layout has only a single groove, which will prevent much passing and negate the closer side-by-side racing that track officials sought.

“It’s one of those things where it would have been better off if they’d have just left it alone,” the Joe Gibbs Racing driver said.

Stewart also said during January’s testing that the cars were “running ridiculously fast speeds” and that it was “stupid to be running this fast in a Cup car.”

But Kahne, who drives a Dodge for Evernham Motorsports, said he didn’t share Stewart’s concern.

Said Kahne, “To me, speed is good.”

Kurt Busch likes the changes. The 2004 Cup champion, who grew up in Las Vegas with his younger brother and fellow Cup driver Kyle Busch, says the Las Vegas speedway is “a totally different race track than what it was before.”

The old one was “considered a flat track, and it was tough to negotiate through the corners with any kind of speed,” Busch said. Now, with the added banking, “We carry that speed to the corner.”

Before Chevy driver Johnson won the Las Vegas race two straight years for Hendrick Motorsports, Ford drivers with the team that’s now called Roush Fenway Racing won five of the previous seven races at the speedway, which opened in 1998. Matt Kenseth and Jeff Burton each won twice, and Mark Martin once.

Kenseth remains with Roush Fenway but Burton is now with Richard Childress Racing and Martin has moved to Ginn.

Martin also arrives in Las Vegas with the Cup points lead after top-five finishes in the series’ opening two races at Daytona International Speedway and California Speedway in Fontana two weeks ago.

But Martin, 48, plans to drive only a partial Cup schedule this year, and he said last week that the points lead hadn’t prompted him to change that plan -- yet.

james.peltz@latimes.com