DOVER, Del. (AP) \u2014 Denny Hamlin overcame a spin on his warmup lap Saturday to win the pole position for the NASCAR All-Star Race at Dover Motor Speedway.<\/p>\n
The Joe Gibbs Racing driver looped his No. 11 Toyota shortly after pulling onto the banking on the 1-mile oval, but he recovered for a two-lap time of 1 minute, 49.298 seconds that included a four-tire pit stop.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI was just trying to get as much heat in the tires as I possibly could,\u201d Hamlin said. \u201cI was just trying to feel it out, and it was slick. I just didn\u2019t want to flat-spot (the tires). The lap was still competitive even though we didn\u2019t do a great job on the warmup. Hats off to the team because they\u2019re the ones that keep you in the game because it\u2019s all about the pit stop.\u201d<\/p>\n
Brad Keselowski qualified second, followed by Erik Jones, Ross Chastain and William Byron at the concrete track known as the \u201cMonster Mile,\u201d which will become the sixth oval to play host to the All-Star Race.<\/p>\n
Hamlin was among several drivers who had trouble on their qualifying laps. Connor Zilisch and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. also spun, and there were 10-second speeding penalties for Zane Smith, Michael McDowell and Kyle Larson. Daniel Suarez\u2019s No. 7 Chevrolet smacked the wall when his right-front tire popped off after the checkered flag.<\/p>\n
Hamlin, the 35th of 36 drivers making a qualifying attempt, said he was trying to be mindful of the earlier issues when he lost control. It\u2019s his second pole position in the All-Star Race, which he won in 2015 after starting first.<\/p>\n
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Sunday\u2019s event will feature two 75-lap stages before concluding with a 200-lap segment featuring 26 cars.<\/p>\n
\u201c(Qualifying) is not my forte,\u201d Hamlin said. \u201cI liked our car. It felt like we were pretty strong. If we can do well in the first segment in traffic where we excel, it could be a good weekend.\u201d<\/p>\n
Though Smith qualified 25th, his No. 38 Ford team was awarded the first pit stall selection and a $100,00 bonus because its crew set the fastest time (12.612 seconds) on the four-tire stop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DOVER, Del. (AP) \u2014 Denny Hamlin overcame a spin on his warmup lap Saturday to win the pole…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":674517,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,3932,7067,181143,12101,634,37349,82,45082,31833],"class_list":["post-674516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-denny-hamlin","tag-dover-motor-speedway","tag-jerome-miron-imagn","tag-joe-gibbs-racing","tag-nascar","tag-pole-position","tag-sports","tag-texas-motor-speedway","tag-zane-smith"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674516","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=674516"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674516\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/674517"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}