June 16, 2012
By Reid Spencer
NASCAR Wire Service
BROOKLYN,
Mich. -- Australian Marcos Ambrose has a new distinction -- he's the
fastest thing in a NASCAR Sprint Cup stock car in 25 years.
With
a record-setting run Saturday at Michigan International Speedway,
Ambrose won the pole for Sunday's Quicken Loans 400, leading 18 other
drivers who broke the 200-mph barrier and 38 others who topped Ryan
Newman's previous track record of 194.232 mph, set in 2005.
Ambrose
claimed the first Coors Light pole award of his career with a lap at
203.241 mph (35.426 seconds), beating second-place qualifier Kevin
Harvick (202.037 mph) by .211 seconds. But Ambrose didn't have long to
enjoy it.
Because
of tire blistering at high speeds during testing and practice on
Thursday and Friday, Goodyear had mandated change to a harder left-side
tire after qualifying. Cup teams were set to practice on the new tires
late Saturday afternoon in preparation for Sunday's race.
Greg Biffle, whose top practice speed on Friday was a series-best 204.708 mph, qualified third on Saturday at 201.816 mph.
Kasey
Kahne (201.720 mph) and Newman (201.472 mph) completed the top five.
Series leader Matt Kenseth will start sixth on Sunday after a lap at
201.461 mph.
Ambrose's
lap was the fastest run in the series since Bill Elliott posted 203.827
mph at Talladega in 1987, the last year the series ran at Daytona and
Talladega without restrictor plates. It was the fastest lap ever run at a
speedway other and Daytona and Talladega and the 11th-fastest in series
history.
Ambrose
is the fourth driver to win a pole at a speed in excess of 200 mph,
joining Benny Parsons, Cale Yarborough and Bill Elliott.
"It
is good bragging right -- I'll give it that," Ambrose said. "I'm just
really excited to get the speed, and to claim to be the fastest guy out
there is just awesome. We've missed some poles -- this is my first pole
in Sprint Cup -- we've missed some by thousandths of a second and
conditions changing, so it's good that we actually got one to stick, and
one that's got so many records attached to it.
"It
felt that fast to me, too. It felt like I was getting it done. Really
fun times out there. When you get onto the frontstretch, and you gain
about 100 RPM in a mile, you know that you got everything you could out
of the corner. We were wide open for about 98 percent of the lap, and I
felt very good about how we got the car dialed in to do that."
Notes:
Dale Earnhardt Jr., second in the series standings, will start 17th on
Sunday… David Stremme and Stacy Compton failed to make the 43-car field.
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