HOMESTEAD, Fla. — Kyle Busch will have the first pit stall for Sunday’s season-ending Monster Energy Series finale after the Joe Gibbs Racing No. 11 team for pole-winner Denny Hamlin selected a stall farther back on pit road.
RELATED: Starting order| Pit stall assignments
Busch’s JGR No. 18 team earned the second starting spot in Friday qualifying at Homestead-Miami Speedway and picked second in the pit-stall selection process Saturday morning. Busch is competing for a series championship in Sunday’s Ford EcoBoost 400 (3 p.m. ET, NBC, MRN, SiriusXM). Hamlin’s team was eliminated from title contention in the first round of the 2018 playoffs.
Hamlin won the Busch Pole on Friday, edging Busch by .043 seconds. He’ll try for his third Homestead-Miami win from the fourth pit stall, which is strategically behind an opening in the pit wall for an easier egress. But the No. 1 stall is typically the most advantageous, with an unimpeded exit from the pit road.
In his post-qualifying news conference Friday, Hamlin said he discussions would take place within Joe Gibbs Racing about pit stall selection. He said that team affiliate Furniture Row Racing asked for the same concession last year for eventual champion Martin Truex Jr. The No. 11 team declined.
“I think everything is earned. Nothing is given,” Hamlin said Friday. “With us having the No. 1 pit stall, nobody else — none of the other competitors will have it. I don’t know. It’s a discussion.”
Team owner Joe Gibbs explained the reasons for the decision, saying in a Saturday morning interview with NBCSN that he continually has to balance what’s best for all four of his Monster Energy Series teams.
“So we all kind of got together as a team and so what came out of those meetings was this: What we want for Denny is to win this race, OK? So that’s important for him. That’s a big deal for us and our sponsor,” Gibbs said. “And then of course the other side of that for our team, we all want to win a championship.
“So we all kind of … we meet, we talk all that over and it’s everybody making a team decision and so we felt like the best thing for us, we want Denny focused on winning this race. He thinks he can do it, and we think he can do it from that pit box, and at the same time, we want to make a team decision, we’d like to win a championship for Joe Gibbs Racing and so that’s part of the complication, the intriguing part of this, but it’s a part of our sport.”
Pit-stall selection hasn’t necessarily been a determining factor in the race outcome. The pole winner hasn’t won the season finale since 2002.
Among the rest of the championship contenders in Sunday’s race: Martin Truex Jr. qualified third and will pit in stall No. 7; Joey Logano qualified fifth and his team chose pit stall No. 3; Kevin Harvick qualified 12th and will pit in stall No. 39.