RICHMOND, Va. – Team Penske’s Ryan Blaney won his fourth pole position of the season and 16th of his championship career Friday afternoon at Richmond Raceway.
The driver of the No. 12 Team Penske Ford will lead the field to green in Saturday night’s Cook Out 400 (7 p.m. ET, USA Network, HBO Max, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio) after posting a lap of 121.485 mph around the 0.75-mile oval, claiming the top position in the closing minutes of the qualifying session.
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“I wouldn’t kind of specify myself as a very good qualifier; for a little bit I struggled in qualifying and just wasn’t able to find the one-lap speed. I was doing the wrong things behind the wheel,” said Blaney, the 2023 series champion. “But I think [crew chief] Jonathan [Hassler] and I kind of worked through how do we make it better. Adjust that end-of-race mindset to qualifying.
“And here [at Richmond], it’s super tough because your last lap in practice to qualifying, you’re qualifying like three seconds faster than what you just ran, so it’s mentally, how do you switch over to that and figure out how to do it in one lap because the second lap today wasn’t going to do it. Jonathan has done a good job of just trying to work through — how do we get better.”
Joe Gibbs Racing’s Chase Briscoe will line his No. 19 Toyota up alongside Blaney on the front row, Blaney bettering his qualifying effort by only 0.050 seconds. This is Briscoe’s 13th top-10 start of the season.
Wood Brothers Racing driver Josh Berry was third fastest in the No. 21 Ford, with last week’s Iowa Speedway race winner, JGR’s Ty Gibbs, fourth on the grid in the No. 54 Toyota and Hendrick Motorsports’ William Byron rounding out the top five in the No. 24 Hendrick Chevrolet.
NASCAR Cup Series championship leader Denny Hamlin – a five-time Richmond winner – was 14th fastest in qualifying, and two-time defending race winner, Richard Childress Racing’s Austin Dillon, was 16th best in the 37-car field.
Dillon is attempting to become only the fourth driver in NASCAR history to win three consecutive Richmond races and join the likes of NASCAR Hall of Famers Richard Petty, Bobby Allison and David Pearson.
“We’ve got to get our car better; we’re not where we were last year in practice. Just got to continue to work on it and see what we can do,” said Dillon, driver of the famous No. 3 Chevrolet. “I think we have tendencies of our car that are good, but we’ve just got to get a little better, so we’ll just go to work and see what we can find for tomorrow.”
Practice recap
Spire Motorsports driver Daniel Suárez turned the fastest lap in Friday’s practice session, navigating the 0.75-mile short track with an average speed of 117.961 mph. Erik Jones (117.955 mph), Austin Cindric (117.878 mph), Riley Herbst (117.709 mph) and Alex Bowman (117.606 mph) completed the top five.
Denny Hamlin, Ty Dillon, Tyler Reddick, Brad Keselowski and Josh Berry completed the top 10.
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Cindric compiled the fastest 10- and 20-lap averages. Kyle Larson had the best 15-lap average, while Ryan Blaney paced 25- and 30-lap averages.
Cody Ware and Tyler Reddick went for separate spins in Group 1 practice, both losing control in Turns 3 and 4. Group 2 practice was completed without incident.
Contributing: Staff report