FONTANA, Calif. — On a cloudy and chilly Saturday morning at Auto Club Speedway, Joey Logano paces himself to the top spot and wins the pole ahead of the NASCAR XFINITY Series Service King 300, that will run later in the day.
For Logano, who landed a time of 39.440 (182.556 mph), it is his first NXS pole of 2017 and the first pole of the season for Team Penske.
“It’s a really fast car.” Logano said. “It’s nice to see speed back in this No.22 again, it’s been a while since they won and today would be a great day for that. We got a good start. This race is crazy and it’s so much fun too with so many different lanes and so much falloff in the tires. There’s going to be comers and goers throughout the run so we got a good start but so many different things can happen throughout this race.”
Starting in second, is rookie Daniel Hemric (39.635/181.658 mph) . The Richard Childress Racing driver who has never raced at Auto Club Speedway before, was fastest in the first qualifying session and backed his effort up when it counted.
“I probably just got too much the first round, never made a qualifying run yesterday so wasn’t sure exactly how much speed we had.” Hemric said. “Really proud of these guys. We worked really hard and just took two big slides, one off of 2 and then one off of 4 coming to the checkered. Honestly we’re surprised we ended up second so that’s a bad thing to be second but if you’re going to be second to a guy like Joey, he’s been around here a couple times. We’ll take it, proud of these guys, proud of ECR. Made a lot of strides coming to RCR and just got to keep taking this and using this momentum going forward.”
“That’s really what we focused on yesterday. With me being here for the first time, trying to figure out what I need to race is a variable that all of us are trying to figure out on the fly. I felt like we got our car pretty decent there near the end of the day and ran out of time to make that qualifying run. With where we were, I’m confident, really proud of how we get to start here. We get track position and try to make the most of our day.”
Qualifying third is 2016 NXS Rookie of the Year, Erik Jones (39.676/181.470 mph). Rounding out the top-5 is California native, Cole Custer and Paul Menard.
Completing the top 12 include, rookie William Byron, 2014 winner Kyle Larson, Brandon Jones, Ty Dillon and Darrell Wallace Jr, Blake Koch and Brendan Gaughan.
Another rookie, William Byron, wants to take advantage of the wide Southern California track.
“This place is really big, it’s really wide and there’s lots of options.” Byron said. “Just figuring out where to run on the racetrack is hard in itself and just figuring out what the car does. So, I think it’s going to be good for us, we’re going to be able to move around and hopefully we will be up front.”
“Just make sure your car can sustain itself through the long run and fire off on restarts. You’re definitely going to want to fire off on restarts, that’s really important every week. So, just try to focus on those things and hopefully we will be up front at the end.”
After the first round of qualifying, some notable drivers failed to make the top-12 in the session. Those drivers include, Joe Gibbs Racing’s Kyle Busch (P16), a trio of JR Motorsports Elliott Sadler (P14), Michael Annett (P17) and Justin Allgaier (P20).
The next on track activity for the NASCAR XFINITY Series is the Service King 300 on Saturday March 25, 2017 at 4:00 pm ET (FS1, MRN and Sirius XM)
