Atlanta Saturday NASCAR Cup Series Notebook

By David Morgan, Associate Editor

HAMPTON, Ga. – Michael McDowell continued his superspeedway qualifying dominance on Saturday at Atlanta Motor Speedway, capturing his fifth pole of the season with a lap of 30.926 seconds, 179.267 to lead the field to green in Sunday’s Quaker State 400.

“I don’t think you ever go into it like, ‘Oh, we’ve got this.’ I knew that we would have a shot at it, but I knew when Blaney went faster than us that first round, even though it was only by a few hundredths, you know that it’s gonna come down to executing everything perfectly, where if you’re talking about a tenth, it’s hard to make up a tenth,” McDowell said of his qualifying run.

“But it’s easy to mess up a couple hundredths, so you’re nervous about doing your job well to make sure you give yourself the best chance. I think Daytona a few weeks ago we had everybody covered by more than a tenth and so it was less nerve racking and then this one I felt like it was gonna take everything being done perfect to have a shot at it.”

McDowell will be joined on the front row by defending Cup champion Ryan Blaney, who will look to kick off his title defense in style at the track where he was a part of a three-wide photo finish back in February.

The remainder of the top-10 starters will be McDowell’s Front Row Motorsports teammate Todd Gilliland, along with Josh Berry, Austin Cindric, Kyle Larson, Joey Logano, Austin Dillon, William Byron, and Chase Briscoe.

Playoff drivers Alex Bowman and Harrison Burton will start 11^th and 12^th, respectively, followed by Chase Elliott in 16^th, Brad Keselowski and Ty Gibbs in 19^th and 20^th, Martin Truex, Jr. in 22^nd, regular season champion Tyler Reddick in 23^rd, Christopher Bell in 26^th, and Daniel Suarez in 30^th.

Denny Hamlin will start shotgun on the field in 38^th after mechanical issues during qualifying left him some three seconds off the pace.

“Something in the powertrain certainly, was not up to speed. So, they’re gonna look into it and then hopefully come up with the fix. But certainly, there’s something wrong there that they’ll get fixed overnight,” Hamlin said.

“Certainly, it’s not ideal, right? We wish we would be upfront with good track position, but, overall, I think, you know, with the way this race plays out, you’re gonna have some want to race, some not. And so, I think, we didn’t have any false hopes that we were gonna really qualify that well here anyway. But certainly, didn’t expect that. Glad at least that we had that one lap to identify we had a problem.”

Playing With House Money

This year’s Playoff class features seven drivers that did not make the postseason a year ago, among them two drivers that had walk-off wins in the last two weeks of the regular season to punch their ticket to the Playoffs – Harrison Burton and Chase Briscoe.

Both drivers weren’t expected to make it to the postseason and now that they’re here, it’s a whole new ballgame for the underdogs.

Burton in particular came from 34^th in points prior to his win at Daytona to make the Playoff field and has renewed confidence that he can make something happen for the No. 21 Wood Brothers Racing team before they go their separate ways at season’s end.

“I mean obviously now that we’re here it’s like you look at the points and we’re 14th in points and right tied on the cut line. I mean we have, you know, mathematically as good a shot as anybody to advance on through this thing,” Burton said.

“Like now that you’re here, it’s like anything, you get greedy when you get a taste of that first win, you want another one and another one and another one. And now that we’re in the playoffs, we just want to advance round after round and see what we can do. It’s just such a great opportunity to be able to reset and very rare in sports or in life. So, really excited to have opportunity to do that and make something of it.”

Likewise for Briscoe, who is headed for a new ride with Joe Gibbs Racing in 2025, but has given his No. 14 team at Stewart-Haas Racing renewed vigor in its final 10 races of existence before it closes its doors at season’s end.

Briscoe noted that his win in the Southern 500 has energized not only his team, but the organization as a whole as they are leaning into the underdog mentality from here on out.

“You know, the way we look at it is we got nothing to lose, right? I mean, they can’t take a drive away from us at the end of the year no matter what,” Briscoe said.

“So, yeah, I feel like we all kind of have a chip on our shoulder to try to prove a lot and, you know, a lot of the team guys don’t have jobs still. Right? My lead engineer’s a great example. He didn’t have anything and now his phone’s ringing. So, I think we all know that it’s gonna be way easier to find a job if we have a win or another win under our belt or a championship or whatever.

“I definitely think that we have kind of nothing to lose and you know, nobody expected us to be here in the first place and kind of playing into that underdog stuff. And yeah, I feel really good about where we’re at as a team and as a race team and yeah, I definitely feel like we’re playing with a little bit of house money for sure.”

Returning to the Scene of the Crime

Daniel Suarez secured his ticket to the Playoffs in the wildest of ways, eeking out a win in a three-wide photo finish against defending series champion Ryan Blaney and two-time series champion Kyle Busch to do so.

Fast forward six months and Suarez and his No. 99 Trackhouse Racing team are back at the scene of the crime as they will look to sweep the season at Atlanta and propel themselves into the next round of the Playoffs.

“It’s definitely good to come back here as last time winners,” Suarez said. “With that being said, you know, we enjoyed that. We had a lot of fun with that, but that’s in the past.

“We have to do the job again and execute little things and make sure that we have a shot at the end. That it is gonna matter. We know that there’s gonna be a lot of contact, a lot of wrecks in the process. We just have to make sure that we’re not part of that and have a good shot in.”

While his Trackhouse Racing teammate Ross Chastain missed out on the Playoffs for the first time since 2021, Suarez will still have a wingman in the driver of the No. 1 Chevrolet as he has made it his mission to help out Suarez any way he can to help him move forward.

“If there’s an opportunity to push the 99, make a hole for him, do anything to help the 99, absolutely. We’re all in,” Chastain said.

“And that starts with building the cars and picking tire pressures and settings and setups and everything, geometry. If Squid wants us to try something, we’ll gladly try it.

“Daniel and I have our differences in how we drive and our teams have their differences in how they operate. But Phil, my crew chief, made it clear to Squid and Daniel, I’ve made it clear to him and our leadership group at Trackhouse, that if there’s an opportunity, Phil and I will both definitely help and the 1 team will help.”