Kevin Harvick captured his sixth pole of the season in qualifying for Sunday’s AAA Texas 500 at Texas Motor Speedway.
Harvick, who has won the last two fall Texas races, took the top spot with a lap of 28.465 seconds, 189.707 mph for his 31st career pole.
“I think the key to the lap was obviously knowing that you had to be wide open and kind of did a halfway qualifying run yesterday and worked most of the day on race runs and making sure we ran enough laps to know where our car was,” Harvick said. “I think the first pit stall is obviously a good stall to have here for pit road time and the things that go with that and I think it is obviously going to be a track position game like it was last time and hopefully that helps us stay on the right side of that.”
Erik Jones qualified second for his best start of season with a lap of 28.588 seconds, 188.890 mph.
“I was definitely surprised,” Jones said. “I didn’t think that we’d be that fast. Also didn’t think we would be the best of our JGR cars. It was really good. I’m really proud of the effort obviously.”
Denny Hamlin, who won the spring Texas race, will start third. Harvick and Hamlin were the only Round of 8 Playoff drivers to qualify in the top 10.
Fresh off announcing a multi-year extension with Chip Ganassi Racing, Kurt Busch qualified fourth with Alex Bowman rounding out the top five.
Aric Almirola, Daniel Suarez, Brad Keselowski, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. and Matt DiBenedetto completed the top 10.
The rest of the playoff drivers are bunched together just outsode the top 10: Joey Logano (11th), Kyle Busch (12th), Kyle Larson (13th), Chase Elliott (14th), Ryan Blaney (15th) and Martin Truex Jr. (17th).
John Hunter Nemechek qualified 29th for his first Cup Series start with his father, Joe, starting 38th. The Nemechek’s become the first father/son drivers in a Cup race since the Hamilton’s in October 2005 at Atlanta.
“That was the first qualifying run I have ever done in a Cup car,” John Hunter Nemechek said. “It was pretty interesting. We went faster today than we did yesterday. That is a positive. We are getting faster every time on the race track. It is a whole new deal for myself being over here in the Cup garage.”
