The No. 11 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota of Denny Hamlin will lead the field to the green flag in Sunday’s NASCAR Cup race at Martinsville Speedway. The Virginia native now has five poles at the half-mile short track, and 49 total in his career.
“The car is good today,” said Hamlin. “We did a lot of really good things in practice. I was hoping to get somewhere in that top eight for qualifying, but just really concentrated on hitting my marks and doing what I needed to do. I thought the track had .20 in it and if I had to do it all over again, I thought I could. But it was good enough.”
The drivers are also dealing with more horsepower this weekend, and Hamlin agreed that “it will change some things. I certainly felt like in practice that you had to be very sensitive to your inputs. There’s going to be good handling cars, and there’s going to be bad. You get to the back of the bad handling cars (as the leader), are you good enough and versatile enough to get around them? That’s going to be the difference.”
Watch: Denny Hamlin rockets to fifth career Martinsville pole
William Byron will join Hamlin on the front row, followed by Josh Berry, Ty Gibbs, and Shane van Gisbergen. For SVG, fifth will now stand as his best oval qualifying effort so far in the Cup Series.
Logano led the early portion of qualifying as he hoped to put a disastrous Darlington race behind him. He remained in control for the first half of the session, but Penske-aligned Berry in the No. 21 Wood Brothers Ford eclipsed him.
Van Gisbergen ended up splitting the leading Fords first, impressively slotting in just 0.005s behind Berry. No one toppled Berry until Hamlin went out, lapping the half-mile in 19.275s. Byron was the closest to Hamlin in the end, but he was still over half a tenth behind Hamlin’s fast lap.
Martinsville Starting Lineup
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