Qualifying Tag

By Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service RICHMOND, Va. – Don’t tell Denny Hamlin his first pole of the season isn’t significant. In the money round of Friday’s knockout qualifying session, the driver of the No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota toured .75-mile Richmond International Raceway in 22.069 seconds (122.344 mph) to earn the top starting spot for Saturday night’s Federated Auto Parts 400 (7:30 p.m. ET on NBCSN), the final race in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series regular season. “I thought for sure we had too many laps on ourRead More

Lewis Hamilton scored his seventh pole position of the 2016 and his fifth at the Italian GP with a dominant performance at Monza where he beat team-mate and title rival Nico Rosberg by almost half second. Sebastian Vettel qualified third for Ferrari ahead of team-mate Kimi Raikkonen. The first casualty of Q1 was Manor’s Esteban Ocon. With eight minutes gone in Q1, the Frenchman, who made his race debut at last weekend’s Belgian Grand Prix, suffered a technical problem that forced him to pull over at Turn 1. He exitedRead More

By: Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service LONG POND, Pa. – Martin Truex Jr. found a lot more than light at the end of the Tunnel on Friday afternoon at Pocono Raceway. Gaining time on the rest of the field through Turn 2—the Tunnel Turn—at the 2.5-mile triangular race track, Truex put his No. 78 Furniture Row Racing Toyota on the pole for Sunday’s Pennsylvania 400 (on NBCSN at 1:30 p.m. ET), knocking fellow Toyota Camry driver Carl Edwards out of the top starting spot. It’s not that Truex and hisRead More

By Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service SONOMA, Calif. – Carl Edwards ran a lightning-fast lap in the first round of Saturday’s knockout qualifying at Sonoma Raceway—and it worried him. “After that first lap—I have to be honest—I sat here and thought, ‘Man, I’m really going to screw this up on the second one,’ ‘cause the first one was really good, but it held on for the pole, and so I’m really excited.” Edwards toured the 1.99-mile road course in 1 minute, 14.392 seconds (96.301 mph) in the first round andRead More

By Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service BROOKLYN, Mich. – After two frustrating weeks of NASCAR Sprint Cup Series qualifying, Joey Logano learned the drill. Posting the fastest speeds in both the second and final rounds of Friday’s knockout time trials at Michigan International Speedway, Logano won the pole for Sunday’s FireKeepers 400 (1 p.m. ET on FS1) at the two-mile track. In the previous two weekends, at Charlotte and Pocono, Logano led the first two rounds of qualifying but failed to close the deal in the decisive third round. OnRead More

By Adam Tate, Associate Editor You just can’t hold Simon Pagenaud back in 2016. Despite a rough Indy 500, despite a disappointing result in yesterday’s Round 1 of the Verizon IndyCar Series’ Dual in Detroit, he just keeps bouncing back. This time by once again nabbing pole position, in a damp and chaotic qualifying session on the tight confines of Belle Isle Raceway. He did so by setting the fast time* in a modified group format for qualifying, that saw the field split into two groups running an accelerated set ofRead More

Red Bull Racing’s Daniel Ricciardo claimed the maiden pole of his Formula One career with a superb lap of the Circuit de Monaco that left him over a tenth of a second clear of Mercedes Nico Rosberg and three tenths ahead of third-placed Lewis Hamilton, who once again had a troubled qualifying session. Ricciardo had made his way through the first two sessions with ease, finishing both segments in fourth place, even setting his fastest lap of Q2 on the supersoft tyre. In those segments, however, it was Ferrari andRead More

By Reid Spencer, NASCAR Wire Service CONCORD, N.C. – Martin Truex Jr. crashed a Ford party on Thursday night, winning the pole for Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway (6 p.m. ET on FOX). With his team making adjustments to the No. 78 Furniture Row Racing Toyota throughout the qualifying session, Truex saved his best lap for the round that counted, covering the 1.5-mile distance in 28.077 seconds (192.328 mph) to edge Team Penske Ford driver Joey Logano (192.007 mph) by .047 seconds for the top starting spot inRead More

By Josh Farmer, IndyCar Reporter & NASCAR Contributor LONG BEACH, Calif. – Helio Castroneves rose to the occasion in the Firestone Fast Six to claim his second straight pole at the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach. Castroneves snuck his way out of group one and made it into the Fast Six. Once the green flag dropped for the Fast Six, Castroneves wasted no time from the get go and laid down the fastest lap of the session. Will Power went off course in turn 9 which brought out the red flag withRead More

By Adam Tate, Managing Editor All 11 Formula One teams have come together and drafted a unanimous letter to FIA President Jean Todt, Bernie Ecclestone and CVC Capital Partners, demanding a return to the 2006-2015 qualifying format. The letter makes it clear that the teams want the disastrous elimination format dropped immediately and that any ideas of aggregate qualifying Ecclestone may have, are not wanted either. It is easily the strongest show of force from the teams on a single issue in some time and something that team bosses and driversRead More