The starting grid for Sunday’s Camping World 400 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series race at Chicagoland Speedway won't become official until inspections Sunday morning, but an unofficial grid was determined during a Saturday evening qualifying session. Austin Dillon posted the fastest lap at 30.636 seconds/176.263 mph in that session, to unofficially take his third pole of the 2019 season and the sixth of his career. That potential pole-winning run came after the driver turned in unimpressive laps outside the top-20 in two practice sessions.
“You don't usually see a guy that was 21st and 25th in both practice sessions jump up to the pole, but I actually felt really confident in our car in the second practice,” Dillon said. “We just, when we put on our stickers, we had our car too low. We were hitting the track, so our speed wasn't there because of that. You can't see that. I felt confident that our car was good and driving good. We just needed to get off the track, and we did and, we went really fast. It was a good lap. I looked at SMT, and I kind of beat everybody off turn two, and it carried down the backstretch. That was a good part of the corner for us."
The two-car team of Richard Childress Racing claimed two starting positions inside the top-three with Dillon’s teammate Daniel Hemric qualifying third.
“It will be good having a teammate there,” Hemric said. “Hopefully, we can work good together. We actually played some doubles ping-pong this week, and I feel like our teammate bond got even closer than what it was, because we kicked some tail in double ping-pong. If anybody wants a shot at him, Rick and I in some ping-pong, come get it."
A former RCR driver, Kevin Harvick, sandwiched himself between the two teammates, qualifying second to start on the front row next to Dillon. Harvick, a Ford driver for Stewart-Haas Racing now, was the only driver from outside the Chevrolet camp to qualify inside the top-five.
“I feel good about our car,” Harvick said. “We had two good practices today, and this is the same car we had at Kansas and ran really well there; we just had some bum luck at the end of the race with that tear-off getting on the front of the car and having to pit. This is an interesting race track because you can run from the bottom to the top, and our car was very versatile. It goes through the bumps well. I felt good about it today; it just has to transfer to tomorrow.”
Harvick and Dillon went out early and claimed their provisional front-row starting spots. Harvick was sixth of the 38 drivers entered to make a qualifying attempt, and his 30.666-second/176.091 mph lap gave him the provisional pole until Dillon went out 12th. After the session completed Dillon and Harvick still were the only drivers to surpass the 176 mph mark.
Chevrolet put five drivers and Ford four inside the top-10, nearly shutting out Toyota. Denny Hamlin was the highest-qualifying Toyota and only Toyota driver inside the top-10 in ninth.
“We’re pretty happy with the car,” Hamlin said. “Overall, we’re pretty happy with it, and we’ll race from where we qualify, but certainly happy with how we practiced today and the adjustments we made.”
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