Joey Logano won the pole for tomorrow’s Pocono 400 at Pocono Raceway in his No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, as all three of the team’s cars qualified in the top five.
Logano shattered Kasey Kahne’s old track record of 172.533 miles per hour in winning his first pole of the season, second at Pocono and fourth of his NASCAR Sprint Cup career.
“I had a great car,” said Logano, who lapped the 2.5-mile triangle at 179.598 mph. “It’s cool to get a pole here, and a new track record is neat.”
Carl Edwards was second, turning a lap of 178.866 mph in his No. 99 Roush Fenway Ford. That was especially impressive given that Edwards said he messed his lap up.
“I drove down in the corner and it was just a little slicker than I thought it was gonna be, and I got out of the groove a little bit on exit,” said Edwards, 12th in points right now. “I just ran out of guts and had to lift a little off of (Turn) 1, and then I totally messed up the Tunnel (Turn), but I’ve got a great race car.”
Starting on the inside of the second row will be the No. 27 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet of Paul Menard, who qualified at 178.582 mph. He’ll be flanked by Kyle Busch, 178.575 mph in a second JGR Toyota.
Row 3 will by Denny Hamlin and Mark Martin, with Regan Smith, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Marcos Ambrose and Kasey Kahne completing the top 10.
Qualifying got off to a bizarre start, as the first three cars on track wiggled badly in Turn 1, which was littered with SpeedyDry from an engine failure in ARCA practice Friday afternoon. Eventually, Scott Riggs was allowed to requalify after nearly wrecking in his first attempt.
David Stremme was the lone driver who failed to qualify.
Greg Biffle comes into tomorrow’s race with a lead of one point over teammate Matt Kenseth and 10 over Earnhardt.
Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100.
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