Less than a week after voicing ‘hate’ toward the NASCAR Cup Series Next Gen race car, Kyle Busch wheeled his No. 8 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet to pole position at Dover (Del.) Motor Speedway.
Busch will lead the field to the green flag for Sunday’s Wurth 400 alongside Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney. Busch edged Blaney by 0.033 seconds.
“I mean I would certainly love for it to be a huge one; getting our season rolling and back in the right direction,” Busch said. “I feel like the last couple of weeks, the discussions at RCR, me and Randall (Burnett), everybody, has just kind of been like – OK, let’s get some sort of a reset going here. We feel like Dover (Motor Speedway) and Kansas (Speedway) are certainly those weeks for us that we definitely want to work towards and put our focus on to get ourselves righted, and it seems to be going well, so far.
“Really excited about the car and the speed that it had. Coming off the truck and the way that it felt, there’s definitely some things that we can be better with or improve upon, but I feel like the changes that we made from practice into qualifying were good. Being able to go a tick faster in the second round over the first round was certainly huge for our qualifying effort and being able to sit on the pole today, so all of that worked out really well.”
Blaney felt his No. 12 Ford was capable of winning the pole. However, he came up one spot short.
“We were close. I thought we had enough of a car for the pole and it was hard to tell how much the track was gonna slow down the second run,” Blaney said. “I made two laps the first round and I think that kind of hurt us. I think most guys in the top handful only made one lap and that helped them out, but I’m proud of the effort.
“I wish I could do my first lap over again. I think I could have hit it a little better, but we have a good car and we’ll see what we have tomorrow.”
Daytona 500 winner William Byron qualified third, followed by last week’s winner at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway, Tyler Reddick in fourth.
Noah Gragson, fresh off his best Cup Series finish (third) last week, starts fifth. Denny Hamlin was the second and final Toyota to qualify in the top 10 in sixth, while a pair of Ford Mustangs in Chase Briscoe (seventh) and Michael McDowell (eighth) followed suit.
Alex Bowman and A.J. Allemdinger completed the top 10.
Defending Dover winner Martin Truex Jr. starts 15th. Spire Motorsports rookie driver Zane Smith crashed during practice, forcing him to miss qualifying. Kaz Grala also made hard contact with the outside wall in practice. He was unable to qualify and will go to a backup car for tomorrow’s race.
“That was so quick. I didn’t even feel like I had time to react to catch it,” Grala recalled. “I’m not really sure because I felt like we had a really good practice. Our car was really close. I thought our race pace was pretty darn good, and I felt like that might have been our best practice session of the year and then it was out from under me before I knew what happened.
“It’s super unfortunate for everyone at Rick Ware Racing. To go to a backup car is not ideal for us, so I feel bad for everybody having to work overtime here and make the most of tomorrow.”