Kyle Larson scored his third straight Busch Pole Award at Sonoma Raceway in qualifying for Sunday’s Toyota/Save Mart 350.
Larson topped both rounds and posted a lap of 94.784 seconds, 95.712 mph in the final round to tie Ricky Rudd (1990-1992) for the series-most consecutive poles at Sonoma.
“I felt like I over-drove the first session,” said Larson, who claimed his eighth career pole. “In the next session, I said ‘Alright, I’m just going to calm down and not make any mistakes’ and I probably under-drove just a little. I felt like through the Carousel and Turn 7, I probably under-drove some and gave up a little bit of speed. But I felt like I made up some time in some other areas too.
“It’s cool to get a third pole in a row here at my home track.”
Larson’s Round 1 time of 94.598 seconds, 95.901 mph is the fastest qualifying lap on the 2.52-mile layout.
The pole run lowered Larson’s average start at Sonoma from 2.8 to 2.5, a personal best among all tracks. Tomorrow will mark his sixth start at the track where he has a 19.0 average finish and is still looking for his first top 10.
“We’ll see if we can do a little better tomorrow than we typically do during the race,” Larson said.
William Byron qualified second to give him his seventh front-row start of the season.
Joey Logano, Chase Elliott and Daniel Suarez rounded out the top five.
“If I could find one spot, I got too loose off 10 trying to throttle up too aggressively and stuck half my left sides up in the dirt and got loose and knocked a few mile an hour off on the exit compared to what I would have been,” Logano said. “Maybe that is a tenth, maybe a half a tenth.”
Denny Hamlin, Kyle Busch, Martin Truex Jr., Ryan Blaney, Chris Buescher, Jimmie Johnson and Alex Bowman completed the top 12.
Erik Jones had a left-rear tire go down in Round 1 and he will start 32nd.
“I didn’t know it was a flat majority of the lap, and it finally blew coming down the frontstretch,” Jones said. “It is pretty unfortunate; we had a top 15 car for qualifying.”
