BROOKLYN, Mich. — Chase Briscoe earned his third consecutive NASCAR Cup Series pole during qualifying Saturday for Sunday’s FireKeepers Casino 400 at Michigan Int’l Speedway.
The driver of the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota turned a lap of 36.826 seconds at 195.514 mph to claim the top spot on the two-mile high-banked race track.
Briscoe also won the pole last week at Nashville Superspeedway and the previous week at Charlotte Motor Speedway. It was his sixth career pole and his fourth of the season.
“Definitely coming here (Michigan) with the new tire, we thought that we were probably going to run wide open, but you never really know until you get here. And I think Noah (Gragson) was the first car out that ran wide open,” Briscoe said of the speed. “So, pretty immediately, I knew that the whole field was going to run wide open. I called Noah (Gragson) right before I got in the car actually and I was like, ‘how easy was it was it? Like a Daytona Talladega style wide open?’ He said, ‘yeah man, it’s easy wide open.’ I did not feel that way. My car was definitely kind of on edge. I was on the verge of lifting a couple times. Christopher (Bell) I thought had me beat, he had to lift off of (turn) four and that was the same spot where I thought I was going to honestly probably hit the fence.
“So yeah, it was not as easy as I thought it was going to be, but the speeds I think was coming from the corner speeds. We’re running wide open now, so the corners (are) faster and that translates down the straight away. Every time we come here, this is the one place that certainly gets your attention just from a speed standpoint. There’s not a lot of places where we’re over 200 mph, so it it’ll be intense tomorrow for sure.”
Kyle Busch will start second in his Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet, while Briscoe’s JGR teammate, Denny Hamlin, will start inside row three.
Point leader William Byron took the fourth spot for Hendrick Motorsports, with his teammate Kyle Larson grabbing the fifth spot.
Chris Buescher, Josh Berry, Ty Gibbs, Bubba Wallace and Zane Smith completed the top 10.
