Truex Claims First Pole of the Season
Defending Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series champion Martin Truex, Jr. captured the pole during Gatorade Pole Day. Truex’s third-place finish last fall was his best at ISM Raceway. 2009 was his first pole and top five at the 1-mile oval.
“Well, it was a good day overall for us,” Truex said. “We’ve qualified okay here in the past but we were always just felt like we were missing a little bit of something in turns 3 and 4. So, we really came here concentrating on trying to fix that and had a gameplan not only with the car setup but kind of my driving style and what I needed to do to be better and just worked on that throughout practice and here we are. So just did a really good job by everybody on our team for understanding what we needed to do to be better and executing.”
Truex’s lap of 26.288 seconds (136.945 mph) was .058-second better than Kyle Larson. Chase Elliott, Alex Bowman, and Joey Logano rounded out the top five. Denny Hamlin, Kyle Busch, Jamie McMurray, Erik Jones, and Kevin Harvick completed the top 10.
[3/9 Photo Gallery] by Dave Higgins
[3/10 Photo Gallery] by Dave Higgins
[3/11 Photo Gallery] by Dave Higgins
by Nicholas Teto, YankeeRacer.com
Statistics from Racing-Reference.info