Kevin Harvick will begin his efforts for a fourth Kansas Speedway win Thursday night from the pole as a result of a blind drawing from among the top-12 teams in the NASCAR Cup Series owner points standings at the halfway point of the season. Harvick’s latest pole is his sixth at Kansas.
“It’s a racetrack where I’ve won a couple races and, for whatever reason, it just kind of fits my style and what we do with the cars,” Harvick said. “We’ve had a lot of good race cars there to capitalize on the good characteristics that fall into my driving style and we’ve been able to have some good results with it.”
Ford teams drew the top-four starting positions, with Joey Logano on the front row with Harvick. Harvick’s Stewart-Haas Racing teammate Aric Almirola drew the third starting position for his fourth-straight top-five start and his fifth in the last six races.
“I’m really looking forward to Kansas on Thursday, knowing we had such a great car at Texas this weekend and continuing the momentum at 1.5-mile tracks,” Almirola said. “This team really deserves a win, and we’re in a position to do whatever it takes to make that happen.”
Almirola will share the second row with Logano’s Team Penske teammate, Ryan Blaney.
Martin Truex will be the highest-starting Toyota driver in the fifth position. Chevrolet driver Alex Bowman will be next to Truex in the third row as the sixth-place starter.
Other top-10 starters include the third Team Penske driver, Brad Keselowski, in seventh. Kyle Busch will start next to him in eighth. Kurt Busch and most recent Kansas race winner Denny Hamlin drew the ninth and 10th starting spots to start in the fifth row.
“I’m pretty optimistic heading in to Thursday’s race at Kansas,” Hamlin said. “Last year for the fall race, our car was rocket fast. I did not go in to the weekend thinking we were going to dominate and we got to the front and flat dominated. There was something about the set up that really made me drive Kansas better than I have in the past. I’m not sure if you can give the driver much credit on that one. I forget where we started in the fall, but certainly, it was just a fast and dominating car, and we were able to hold off a few guys in those final few restarts to win it. Chris [Gabehart, crew chief] just nailed it on that one, and any time you have a car that handles as good as that one, it makes things a lot easier. There isn’t much to change from the last race to this race, so that gives us a good baseline to start with Thursday night. I think based on our notes from last year and how this FedEx team has been performing this year, we can go in to Thursday night’s race and have a similar performance to last year and get another win with our FedEx Camry.”
The other two drivers included in the drawing for top-12 starting positions were Chase Elliott and Matt DiBenedetto, who drew the 11th and 12th positions.
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