{"id":875119,"date":"2026-08-28T23:26:15","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T23:26:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/875119\/"},"modified":"2026-08-28T23:26:15","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T23:26:15","slug":"rajah-caruth-wins-first-career-nascar-oreilly-pole-at-daytona","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/875119\/","title":{"rendered":"Rajah Caruth wins first career NASCAR O’Reilly pole at Daytona"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ahead of the biggest race of his young NASCAR\u00a0<\/a>career, Rajah Caruth put together the best lap of his life in O’Reilly Auto Parts Series qualifying at Daytona on Friday afternoon.\u00a0<\/p>\n

With a blistering qualifying lap of 49.118 seconds\/183.232 mph around the 2.5-mile superspeedway, Caruth, who enters the race 15 points below the Chase cut line, won his first career O’Reilly Series pole and will lead the field to the green flag in Friday’s Winn-Dixie 250.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Carson Kvapil, Caruth’s JR Motorsports teammate, will join him on the front row, with defending series champion Jesse Love, Sheldon Creed and Sammy Smith rounding out the top five qualifiers. Sam Mayer, William Sawalich, Austin Hill, Anthony Alfredo and Taylor Gray completed the top 10.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tNotable qualifying results<\/p>\n

Other notable qualifying efforts include Ryan Sieg in 12th, Brandon Jones in 13th, Corey Day in 14th, Brent Crews in 17th and points leader Justin Allgaier in 18th.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Andy Jankowiak, who is making his O’Reilly Series debut on Friday evening, laid down the slowest lap of the session at 51.302 seconds but still made the race thanks to the owners’ standings. That left Dawson Cram, who was 0.08 seconds faster than Jankowiak, on the outside looking in. Cram is the only driver\u00a0not to make Friday’s race.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Friday’s race is the regular season finale for the O’Reilly Series, with Parker Retzlaff (9th, +46), Mayer (10th, +19), Sawalich (11th, +1), Crews (12th, +1), Gray (13th, -1) and Caruth (14th, -15) all trying to make the Chase. Retzlaff needs only 10 points on the night to make the postseason.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Winn-Dixie 250 will go green shortly after 7:30 p.m. ET, with coverage on the CW, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ahead of the biggest race of his young NASCAR\u00a0career, Rajah Caruth put together the best lap of his…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":875120,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[446],"tags":[49,48,634,82],"class_list":["post-875119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nascar","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-nascar","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875119","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=875119"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/875119\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/875120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=875119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=875119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=875119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}