RELATED: Full Daytona qualifying speeds
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — It wasn’t a Daytona 500 pole-winning effort Sunday afternoon at Daytona International Speedway, but Joe Gibbs Racing Toyotas were four of the top-10 fastest qualifiers for next Sunday’s Daytona 500.
And that’s an important first step.
Twenty-year old rookie Chase Elliott became the “Great American Race’s” youngest ever pole-winner driving newly retired Jeff Gordon‘s No. 24 Chevrolet, but a team of Toyotas turned in efforts to ensure they must be reckoned with come the Feb. 21 season-opening Daytona 500.
Toyota driver Denny Hamlin joked even late Saturday night after winning his third Sprint Unlimited non-points race that the trophy and acclaim were great for his resume, but the Daytona 500 was what mattered most. To him and to the team.
“I was joking with Denny in the winner’s circle, I said, it’s the 500, OK, not the Unlimited,” Hamlin’s team owner Joe Gibbs said, laughing but clearly quite serious, too. “I says (to him), try and get us a 500, will you? It’s been 23 years since we were able to win one.”
As soon as Hamlin sat down to take post-race questions from the media, the first thing he asked the crowd was, “By the way, has Joe mentioned he wants to win the 500 yet?”
Unlike past years when one manufacturer tended to dominate the top-10 qualifying spots, this year’s pole-qualifying featured a more balanced look — five Chevrolets (including pole-winner Elliott), four Toyotas and three Fords among the top-12 final round qualifying participants.
Hendrick Motorsports had three of its four Chevrolets among the top six.
But it is the first time the two-time Daytona 500 winner Kenseth has started on the front row for the event. Michael Waltrip was the last Toyota driver to earn a front row start — lining up second alongside Jimmie Johnson in 2008.
“Obviously everybody says it but qualifying here is truly a team effort,” Kenseth said. “We’ve never qualified on the front row here before so that certainly takes some of the pressure off earlier in the week.”
Kenseth’s JGR teammate Carl Edwards echoed the promise and potential coming out of Sunday’s qualifying efforts. He sounded encouraged by the speed and hopeful of how it may translate in Thursday’s Can Am Duel races that will set the remainder of the field behind the front row.
“We’re just building good cars and that showed up on the track last night,” Edwards said of the Unlimited showing. “Those days you have Toyotas up front and Denny was able to close the deal. He was the first to say we worked well together and it was overall good.”
Then Edwards smiled and acknowledged, “He brought that up to me too,” of Gibbs’ vocal urgency to win the Daytona 500. “He’s a competitor deep down and he wants to win this thing.”