Burton takes Busch Bud Pole at Darlington

DARLINGTON, S.C. -- - Jeff Burton took the first step toward taming the track "too tough to tame" on Friday by claiming the NASCAR Busch Series Bud Pole Award for Saturday's darlingtonraceway.com 200.

Driving the No. 9 Gain Ford, Burton laid down a lap of 168.250 mph (29.228 sec) around the 1.366-mile, egg-shaped oval. This is his ninth career NBS pole in 221 starts.

Starting outside of him in the 147-lap race will be Jeff Green in the No. 21 Rockwell Automation Chevrolet with a lap of 168.100 mph (29.254 sec) to make it an all Jeff front row.

Burton qualified 37th of 45 drivers and supplanted Green, who made the 13th attempt, with the faster speed. This is Burton's second pole in as many races this year as he took both the pole and victory at Las Vegas earlier this month.

"I thought that was a pretty good lap and we made some changes just before qualifying from practice," Burton said. "We were a little off in the morning practice, but that's kind of normal for many of us.

"We worked on our race setup this morning and just took a shot at qualifying at the last minute. It seemed to work real well, too.

"I'm proud of this Busch team. We have a real aggressive program this year and we really changed the way we were doing things before. Any time that we can get gone qualifying or racing, we're happy with what we did.

"To run fast here you kind of have to hang it out and hope."

Green has 13 career NBS starts at Darlington and has top-10 finishes in the last four outings at the track. But even with his success, he knew that Burton was going to be a threat.

"I knew that he (Burton) would be go after what we saw in practice and he had a shot at beating us," Green said. "We laid a lap down that gave it all we had. I got a little tight in Turns 3 and 4 and that probably kept me from running that extra two-hundredths that he beat me by.

"Second is still a good place to start and that's pretty good if you can't get the pole."

Jason Keller in the No. 57 Albertsons Ford, the former NBS teammate to Green, rounded the track at a speed of 167.836 mph (29.300 sec) after having the fastest time during the morning practice session. He will start third with Scott Riggs outside of him in fourth.

"We came here and tested before we went to Daytona and ran a lot of qualifying runs and really got our car balanced," Keller said. "It was a good solid lap. Anytime you qualify in the top three or top five here, it's good.

"We didn't get that perfect lap to get on the pole. We can't complain, we had a shot at it."

Starting behind them will be Greg Biffle and Kenny Wallace, with Mike McLaughlin, Lyndon Amick, Jamie McMurray and Tony Raines rounding out the top-10.

Green flag falls at 1 p.m. for the fourth NASCAR Busch Series race of the season. The race can be seen live on FX and heard on MRN Radio.