MARTINSVILLE, Va. — William Byron picked a good time for his first career NASCAR Cup Series pole at Martinsville Speedway, qualifying first for a race that he is treating as a must-win.<\/p>\n
The Hendrick Motorsports driver, who is among six playoff drivers battling to claim the final two spots in the Championship 4 season finale, turned a lap of 19.286 seconds (98.185 mph) in his No. 24 Chevrolet to nip Ty Gibbs\u2019 No. 54 Toyota by two thousandths of a second on the 0.526-mile oval.<\/p>\n
Kyle Larson qualified third, followed by Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin as playoff drivers took four of the top five starting positions for Sunday\u2019s 500-lap race.<\/p>\n
Larson and Christopher Bell, who qualified 12th, both are comfortably above the points cutline and could advance to the Nov. 2 title round at Phoenix Raceway with solid finishes at Martinsville.<\/p>\n
Byron likely needs a win to reach the Championship 4 for the third consecutive year, and the two-time Martinsville winner positioned himself well with his third pole this season at a track where his previous best starting spot was third.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s great; it\u2019s not the race, though,\u201d Byron said about his 16th career pole and first in 26 races. \u201cWe\u2019ve got a lot of work to do, but it feels nice. We usually struggle to qualify well here. Just excited for (Sunday). It\u2019s a big challenge, and that\u2019s what counts. After 500 laps, we\u2019ll see how we are.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also in must-win territory are Logano, Chase Elliott, who will start eighth, and Ryan Blaney, who qualified a disappointing 31st in pursuit of his third consecutive victory in the third-round cutoff race at Martinsville.<\/p>\n
Hamlin\u2019s No. 11 Toyota initially failed to start on its qualifying run and needed a push from several team members to get the engine fired. It\u2019s at least the third mechanical problem during the playoffs for Hamlin, who had issues with power steering at Kansas Speedway and a stuck throttle at Talladega Superspeedway.<\/p>\n
The Joe Gibbs Racing driver was optimistic that he wouldn\u2019t forfeit his Martinsville starting spot by making an unapproved adjustment before Sunday\u2019s race.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou\u2019ve got to know what the problem is before you can fix it,\u201d he said, \u201cand I don\u2019t think we know what the problem is.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hamlin could take solace in already having advanced to the championship round with his Oct. 12 victory at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. JGR teammate Chase Briscoe, who qualified ninth at Martinsville, joined Hamlin in the Championship 4 with his victory last Sunday at Talladega.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"MARTINSVILLE, Va. — William Byron picked a good time for his first career NASCAR Cup Series pole at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":240304,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,113200,82],"class_list":["post-240303","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nascar","tag-nascar-sports-auto-racing-league-nascar","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=240303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/240303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/240304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=240303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=240303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=240303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}