Martin Truex Jr. and the No. 78 Bass Pro Shops/5-hour ENERGY Toyota had a slight bobble coming off Turn 4 but still went on to capture the pole position for Saturday night’s Toyota Owners 400 at Richmond Raceway.
Truex earned the pole with a final-round lap of 21.799 seconds at 123.859 mph on the 0.75-mile D-shaped oval. It was his first pole position in 25 starts at Richmond Raceway and third of the 2018 NASCAR Cup Series season.
“Definitely a good way to start the weekend today,” said Truex. “I thought we had a good day overall. I’d say out of all of the short tracks I’d say this has probably been the one that we’ve probably been consistently the best at and definitely had the most chances to win here. I feel like we’ve run really strong the past few times and led a bunch of laps and I definitely feel like we should’ve won here already.
“It wasn’t perfect by any means, but the guys gave me a great race car. The Bass Pro Shops/5-hour ENERGY Toyota was really good. I slipped a little bit off (turn) four and thought I gave it away but we were luckily able to hang onto it. It’s been a really solid day after kind of a crappy last two weeks. Love racing here. This place is so much fun, hopefully we’ll have it dialed in tomorrow night.”
The Furniture Row Racing entry was first after the first round of qualifying (21.752, 124.127) and fourth after the second round (21.785, 123.938).
The balance of the top-12 qualifiers were: Chase Elliott, Joey Logano, Denny Hamlin, Kyle Larson, Kurt Busch, Erik Jones, Jamie McMurray, William Byron, Kevin Harvick, Alex Bowman, and Ricky Stenhouse Jr.
Saturday night’s Toyota Owners 400 will air live beginning at 4:30 p.m. MT (6:30 p.m. ET) on Fox, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio Channel 90 and MRN.
Featured Image Credit: Furniture Row Racing, Twitter