Denny Hamlin earned his first pole of the season by topping Ryan Newman in Saturday’s qualifying for the Emory Healthcare 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Hamlin turned in a lap of 187.380 m.p.h. around the fast 1.54-mile oval for his eight career Sprint Cup Series pole, but his first since last October at Fontana, CA. He also gave Joe Gibbs Racing its 50th pole in the series.
Newman qualified 0.05 seconds behind Hamlin to capture the outside pole. Newman shares the record with Buddy Baker for most poles at Atlanta with seven each. MiamiHerald.com
“These next two weeks, we’re bringing everything we’ve got to the racetrack—the best stuff that we have—and see how we’re going to stack up against the competition,” said Hamlin, who won his first pole of the season and the eighth of his career.
“We’re not waiting for the Chase. We’re bringing what we have to see where we’re going to stack up competition-wise these next two weeks. We brought our best stuff here. We never qualify on the pole. We never qualify in the top 10, so this is a great step at a good time for our team.”
“I think we have a good race package as well,” Newman said. “All that being said, we’re second. We’ll start up front and hopefully finish up there.
“We can’t expect as a team to go out there and make up points in two races that we didn’t accomplish in the last 24. That being said, we’ll do the best job we possibly can. We’ll go out, and if we win the race, we win the race. If we finish in the top five in both of them, we still may not have enough points to make it into the Chase. So either way, we are searching for our best finish, no different than any other race.” Pit Road Scene
Starting on Row 2 will be Hamlin’s teammate, Kyle Busch, who had a lap of 187.063 mph, and Carl Edwards, who ran 186.881 mph in his No. 99 Roush Fenway Racing Ford.
“Momentum is a big key,” said Busch, who won the most recent Sprint Cup race at Bristol two weeks ago. “If we can run strong here, that is something we can build on our mile-and-a-half program and that’s something I haven’t been so well at this year. Denny’s been good, we haven’t been that good, but we’ve been good at the short tracks. We’re hoping to just kind of keep all that going and build some stronger race cars for in the Chase.”
Tony Stewart tied Edwards’s speed but will start fifth on the basis of points. Martin Truex Jr. was sixth, his No. 56 Michael Waltrip Racing Toyota qualifying at 186.818 mph.
Completing the top 10 were Juan Pablo Montoya, Jimmie Johnson , David Ragan and Kasey Kahne. FOXNews
Hamlin has five wins this season, but it’s been nearly three months since his last victory. He’s coming off a 34th-place finish at Bristol and is fifth in the point standings.
“I feel like the last 10 races have definitely been up and down for our team,” he said. “We were on such a hot streak there. We kind of got spoiled. The regular season was kind of irrelevant at that point because we knew we were going to get in the Chase.”
Hamlin said the team started racing for victories instead of points.
“We’re going to treat these next two weeks as if we’re Chase racing,” he said. “We found ourselves going for wins so much, going all-out for wins, that it probably hurt us in the long run. These next two weeks, we’re going back to points racing.” The Associated Press
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NASCAR Sprint Cup Series: Emory Healthcare 500 at Atlanta - Race Line-Up
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