Ryan Blaney scored his first pole of the season when he earned the top spot for Sunday’s Ticket Guardian 500 at ISM Raceway.
The Team Penske driver turned a lap of 141.287 mph in the day’s final round to post his sixth career Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series pole.
“It’s a good way to start the weekend off, for sure,” Blaney said. “Qualifying hadn’t been our best this year, but this is the first short track we’ve been at. We’ve had speed all day, which has been a lot of fun and we just kind of tweaked on it and tweaked on it.
“It’s a good way to start off the weekend. Hopefully, it keeps going well for us.”
ISM Pole Winners | Paint Schemes
It was the season’s first pole for Team Penske, which looks to win its third straight race on Sunday.
Chase Elliott, Denny Hamlin, Kyle Busch and Brad Keselowski rounded out the top five.
“I hate qualifying second,” Elliott said. “I look forward to Sunday. At least we have a good place to start. I really would have liked to get a pole outside a speedway track, so we’ll try again next week.”
Alex Bowman, William Byron, Kevin Harvick, Martin Truex Jr. and Erik Jones completed the first ten qualifiers.
Tempers flared after round one between Michael McDowell and Daniel Suarez triggering a brief fight between the two drivers.
“I held him up on that lap, that was just a miscommunication,” McDowell explained about what happened on track to lead to the physicality. “We were all waiting until the end to go out there.”
The two fell to the ground when Suarez tackled McDowell after the Front Row Motorsports driver approached him.
“Just a lack of respect,” Suarez said. “You got to try to get out of the way if someone is making a hot lap. That’s racing. I’m the kind of driver that I’m going to give a lot of respect to you, always, if you give me respect back. If you don’t give me respect, I’m going to go kick your ass.” (More and Video)
Monster Energy NASCAR Cup series drivers and teams will have two practice sessions on Saturday to dial their cars in for Sunday’s fourth race of the 2019 season.
