McMurray upstages Chase drivers with Martinsville pole run
Oct. 24, 2014
By Reid Spencer
NASCAR Wire Service
MARTINSVILLE,
Va.— When the green flag waves to start the Goody’s Headache Relief
Shot 500 on Sunday at Martinsville Speedway (1:30 p.m. ET on ESPN), it
won’t be a Chase for
the NASCAR Sprint Cup driver who leads the field to the start/finish
line.
Touring
the .526-mile short track in 18.954 seconds (99.905 mph) in his No. 1
Ganassi Racing Chevrolet, Jamie McMurray upstaged the championship
contenders on Friday in winning
the pole for the first race in the Eliminator Round of the Chase.
In
claiming his second Coors Light pole award of the season, his second at
Martinsville and the 11th of his career, McMurray beat title contenders
Joey Logano (99.605 mph)
and Matt Kenseth (99.318 mph) for the top spot.
Tony
Stewart (99.297 mph) qualified fourth, followed by Chase driver Denny
Hamlin (99.266 mph). Six of the eight eligible remaining Chase drivers
qualified in the top 12. Brad
Keselowski will start sixth, Ryan Newman ninth and Carl Edwards 11th.
In McMurray’s case, practice made perfect. His pole followed a productive recent test session at the historic short track.
“We
tested here a couple of weeks ago, and I thought we had one of the best
tests that I’ve been a part of, really since I started racing,” McMurray
said. “Really well organized…
We made the car better throughout the test and hit on a couple things
that really had a lot of speed in it.
“So I
was pretty excited about getting here this weekend. Our cars have been
so quick the past two or three months—really all year, but more so in
the past few months. This
is a great track for me, and we had a really good test. When things are
going well, you get excited to come back to the track. It was really
great that we were able to take that test and use that toward earning
the pole today.”
Jeff
Gordon, one of the pre-race favorites, narrowly missed advancing to the
second round of knockout qualifying and will start 13th. The real
casualty of Friday’s time trials,
however, was Kevin Harvick, who scraped the wall in the 30-minute first
round and will start 33rd.
“We
just missed it today,” said Harvick, whose career-average finish of 15.8
at Martinsville is worst among the eight remaining Chase drivers. “We
were way too loose. We struggled
in practice and just missed it in qualifying.
“We’ll just have to get it better (in Saturday’s practice) and be ready to go on Sunday.”
Gordon, who missed advancing to the second round by .003 seconds, shrugged off his position on the grid.
“I
don’t mind starting 13th,” he said. “It’s not a bad place to start. You
just want that really good pit stall, and so we’ll definitely suffer
with a pit stall a little bit.
“But we can definitely still win it from there. Our car is really good.”
No comments:
Post a Comment