Aric Almirola captured his first pole since 2012 when he took the top spot for Sunday’s Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series Folds of Honor QuikTrip 500 at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
After his Stewart-Haas Racing teammate Clint Bowyer paced the first two rounds, Almirola posted a lap of 30.55 seconds, 181.473 mph in the third round to take his second career Busch Pole Award.
“In that final round, we knew that a second lap was going to be faster than the first,” Almirola said. “That first lap, we kind of decided to throw that lap away and work on building the speed up. That second lap just really executed and hit all my marks perfectly and was able to be good enough and had a really fast lap to get the pole which is really cool because I haven’t done it in like seven years. That was pretty neat.”
Sunday’s race will mark the first with the new rules package.
“I think that with this new package, there is going to be a lot of risk versus reward with building speed into your car because then you sacrifice handling,” Almirola said. “It is going to be really hard and a very tall task to trim your car out and have speed and still have it driving good. If you make your car drive good it probably won’t handle very good. If you make it handle good it probably won’t be very fast. That is the challenge that the teams and engineers and drivers are faced with with this package.”
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Ricky Stenhouse Jr. qualified second for his second top-10 start of 2019 and his fifth in seven races at Atlanta.
“We made some big improvements the first run,” Stenhouse Jr. said. “We were 18th but our engineers really made a lot of adjustments to get us to where we needed to be so that I could hold the car wide open because the first run I couldn’t.”
Bowyer, who also topped the first practice session, wound up third (180.410 mph).
Last week’s Daytona 500 winner Denny Hamlin was fourth with SHR’s Daniel Suarez rounding out the top five.
Kyle Busch, Kyle Larson, Kurt Busch, Martin Truex Jr., Austin Dillon, Jimmie Johnson and Michael McDowell completed the top 12.
Defending race winner Kevin Harvick battled steering issues all day and qualified 18th.
“Today has been a complete waste of time for us,” Harvick said. “It has been a bit of a challenge today. We haven’t really made any laps that you can actually turn the car. We were kind of just hoping for the best there and it didn’t fix any of it.”
Ryan Preece (25th) was the fastest qualifying rookie.
Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney and Joey Logano failed to make it past the first round, qualifying 26th and 27th, respectively.
“I just got loose the first lap behind the 10 trying to find the right distance behind the car I wanted to be,” Logano said. “I don’t know if I was the right distance or the handling was just off. We tightened it up the second time but it didn’t give us any speed. We will start in the back and work our way up.”
Final practice will be held Saturday starting at 12 p.m. ET.
