AAA Texas 500 at Texas Motor Speedway: Austin Dillon wins pole
By Ted Fleming
Sunday’s race will surely eliminate one of the four drivers from the Joe Gibbs Racing stable.
With a speed of 192.301 mph (28.081 seconds) in the third round of qualifying, Austin Dillon captured his second pole of the year and will lead the field to green for the AAA Texas 500 at Texas Motor Speedway. He has positioned Richard Childress Racing to snap a 106 winless streak on Sunday. It was also the first pole at Texas for RCR.
“Man, that’s huge,” Dillon said. “Great job to our Bad Boy Realtreee Chevy, everybody at Dow for supporting us and getting us this far. It is our second pole of the year, and I can’t be happier for RCR and everybody back at the shop. A lot of hard word and effort goes on. We missed the Chase by just two feet. We want to prove that we can win a race by the end of this year. This is big for us. I thought I messed up the lap truthfully. I got a lot of good speed off of two, but turn three I turned in and missed my corner, but it worked out.”
Joey Logano was fastest in round one (194.266 mph) and was second quickest in the final round so he will start next to Dillon on the front row.
Joe Gibbs Racing had all four of its drivers make the Chase when the field was set at 16 and they made it through two cutoffs into the Round of 8, but once Jimmie Johnson found the winner’s circle a week ago at Martinsville, there are only three spots left to advance to the Championship Four when the season wraps up at Homestead-Miami Speedway on Nov. 20.
What this all means is that this weekend’s AAA Texas 500 will be the site where one JGR entry will definitely be eliminated and possibly two, depending on who takes the checkered flag on Sunday. They will start 7th (Matt Kenseth), 9th (Carl Edwards), 17th (Denny Hamlin) and 24th (Kyle Busch).
With Johnson already locked in, he has jumped out to a 2/1 favorite to win the title with Kevin Harvick and Kyle Busch at 3/1 and 5/1, respectively.
Under cloudy and cool conditions, speeds were up during practice, however, the qualifying record of 200.11 mph by Tony Stewart in 2014 was safe.
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PIT NOTES:
Kyle Busch had a practice crash that destroyed his primary car and he was forced to qualify – and will race – in a backup. It did not seem to affect his first run as he was second quickest behind Joey Logano. However, he never made a second run because he had a water leak and will start 24th.
“Kind of puts us a little bit more behind the eight ball than we’d like to be,” he said. “Hate that happened for my guys and all the work they’ve already put into my primary and now having to switch to a backup car is not how we wanted to start off practice. Didn’t even get a lap on that thing.
“All in all, I know we have a strong group and a great group of guys that will dig in as deep as they need to in order to make sure we can prepare to get ourselves back to where we need to be to be competitive this weekend. As far as what we look for here, we want to have a good, solid day. We’d like to win the race and punch our ticket and move right on the Homestead. If we can’t have that, a good, solid top-five is what we are looking for.”
As part of their farewell tribute to his career, Texas Motor Speedway will give out bobbleheads of Tony Stewart to the first 30,000 fans on Sunday.
Because it was Friday with live Breeders Cup horse racing on NBC Sports Network and their other channels tied up with regular programming, qualifying for the AAA Texas 500 was forced to be carried only on the NBC Sports App. A replay of qualifying can be seen on NBCSN at 10:30 p.m. ET.
SPRINT CUP AAA TEXAS 500 STARTING LINEUP:
1 – Austin Dillon
2 – Joey Logano
3 – Kevin Harvick
4 – Brad Keselowski
5 – Kyle Larson
6 – Paul Menard
7 – Matt Kenseth
8 – Ryan Blaney
9 – Carl Edwards
10 – Kurt Busch
11 – Chase Elliott
12 – Martin Truex Jr.
13 – Casey Mears
14 – AJ Allmendinger
15 – Jamie McMurray
16 – Alex Bowman
17 – Denny Hamlin
18 – Ryan Newman
19 – Jimmie Johnson
20 – Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
21 – Aric Almirola
22 – Danica Patrick
23 – Tony Stewart
24 – Kyle Busch
25 – Greg Biffle
26 – Trevor Bayne
27 – Clint Boyer
28 – Michael McDowell
29 – Brian Scott
30 – Chris Buescher
31 – Kasey Kahne
32 – Regan Smith
33 – Matt DiBenedetto
34 – Landon Cassill
35 – Ryan Ellis
36 – David Ragan
37 – Michael Annett
38 – Reed Sorenson
39 – Joey Gase
40 – Josh Wise