Aric Almirola will be the first, ever, NASCAR Cup Series pole sitter at Nashville Superspeedway and the first for the series in the Nashville area since 1984 Sunday. With a 29.55-second/161.992 mph lap in qualifying Sunday morning, Almirola claimed the top starting spot for the afternoon’s inaugural Ally 400.
Almirola was the provisional pole sitter through nearly the entire 39-car qualifying session, posting the eventual pole-winning lap second in the qualifying order.
“That’s been the hard part about this year – we got in a wreck at Daytona and immediately it puts you in a hole,” Almirola said of a lack of qualifying for most races this season. “Every race thereafter just keeps compounding and last week just always haunts you,” Almirola said. “You can’t ever start fresh the next week, because you’re starting deep in the field. Then, we’ve had a lot of other trouble, and we’re buried in points. It’s so hard to build any momentum off that. Finally, a good weekend, to come here and qualify on the pole.”
Kyle Busch qualified second to start alongside Almirola on the front row after notching a milestone 100th NASCAR Xfinity Series win at the track Saturday.
“It was better than expected,” Busch said. “I didn’t expect to qualify that well, so that’s certainly a positive. Being able to get some speed in our Pedigree Camry, so it’s nice to have an upfront spot like that. Oh, so close to getting the pole. We don’t get the chance to qualify much anymore, and when you get that close, it’s like, damn, you have a goose egg in that column, because we are not good with the metric system. Overall, just hopefully, today is a good day. We struggled yesterday, so I wasn’t so sure what we would have in store for us today, but it felt okay right there. I have no idea what that means for a race car. We completely wholesaled everything and changed it last night, so we will see what we have later today.”
Joey Logano qualified third.
William Byron, who led a Chevrolet dominance of the lone practice session on Saturday, was the highest qualifying Chevrolet driver Sunday morning, qualifying in the fourth position. He’ll have to drop to the back for the start of the race, though, because of an unapproved adjustment to his car after qualifying.
Chevrolets posted the seven fastest laps in practice, the top-three of those coming from the Hendrick Motorsports camp. Teammates Kyle Larson and Chase Elliott were second snd third to Byron in practice. When qualifying rolled around the following morning, Larson and Elliott were right behind their teammate, again, this time in the fifth and sixth positions.
All four Hendrick entries qualified in the top-10, with Alex Bowman in eighth. Other top-10 qualifiers included Cole Custer in seventh, Erik Jones in ninth and Ryan Blaney in 10th.
Jones, after qualifying in the top-10, like Byron, will drop to the back for the initial green flag, because his crew made repairs to the car before the race. The damage was a result of Jones scraping the wall in qualifying.
