Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Matt Kenseth, Denny Hamlin and Daniel Suarez completed the top six, followed by Erik Jones, who will move over to the Gibbs team next year and went seventh-fastest in qualifying.
Kvle Busch, Jamie McMurray, Clint Bowyer, Brad Keselowski and Austin Dillon were the rest of the 12 drivers who advanced through all three knockout rounds.
Three playoff drivers were eliminated in round two, led by seven-time and defending series champion Jimmie Johnson, who was the first man below the cut line and will start 13th (29.039/185.957) on Sunday in his No. 48 Lowe’s Chevrolet.
Johnson missed transferring to the pole round by two hundredths (.02) of a second.
“That’s so small, that’s a wind gust,” Johnson said of the negligible difference in time between himself and 12th. “The thing I’m looking at is progression through the rounds. I picked up speeds through the rounds and over what we did over practice and that was all trending the right way. I think my effort level was dialed in a little better today. Certainly, I want to be better than that, but I look at the fact I out-qualified my teammates.”
“We got faster through the rounds and we’re starting closer to the front than we have in quite a few weeks. There’s some good takeaways for today. Qualifying isn’t my sweet spot and I’m trying so hard to get better at that. This a good week for me. I’ve been trying to discover some things to get better and I think I can say I’ve gotten a little bit better (at qualifying).”
The other playoff drivers starting outside the first six rows are Kyle Larson (14th) and Chase Elliott (15th).
Meanwhile, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. was the lone playoff driver who didn’t make it out of round one, and he will roll off 25th (29.421/183.542) on Sunday in the No. 17 Fastenal Ford.
“In practice, we were a little loose. We made some adjustments and made our Fastenal Ford a little better, but it wasn’t quite good enough,” said Stenhouse. “We were really fighting two things: in (turns) three and four, I was a little too tight, but in (turns) one and two I was a little too loose and just didn’t have enough grip in our car to get the job done like we did earlier here this year, when we qualified fourth.”
“We’ll go back to work tomorrow and we know a few things we need to do different and get us closer to where we were here in the spring. The times were so tight right there that I thought we were going to be able to get in. We just picked up only a little bit, not enough (to move on).”
Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series teams will return to the track Saturday at 11 a.m. ET for the first of two rounds of practice ahead of the Hollywood Casino 400.
Full qualifying results can be viewed on the next page…
