CONCORD, N.C. — Chase Briscoe turned his recent qualifying struggles around by winning the pole for Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600 during qualifying Saturday afternoon at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
The driver of the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota turned a lap of 29.532 seconds at 182.852 mph to earn his second pole of the season and the fourth of his NASCAR Cup Series career.
Briscoe was focused this weekend on improving his qualifying effort.
“I feel like the team has done the same thing all year, it’s just me not driving hard enough, truthfully. I talked about it yesterday,” Briscoe said. “This car just has so much potential that I’m just not used to being able to do the things that this car will do because in the past my car would – look at last year here, I plugged the fence down coming off of turn four trying to do what I just did there.
“Just the capability of this car is so much more than I‘ve ran my entire career, and it has just taken a few months to get to used to that, so, hopefully, this will kind of be the start of normal, qualifying and competing for poles. It is definitely a nice turnaround from what we’ve had.”
Briscoe’s pole marks the second consecutive year a Toyota captured the top spot in Coca-Cola 600 qualifying. Ty Gibbs, Briscoe’s teammate, earned the pole last year.
Kyle Larson – who will compete in the Indianapolis 500 and the Coca-Cola 600 on Sunday – will start second after a 29.552-second run on Saturday.
William Byron, Chris Buescher and A.J. Allmendinger rounded out the top five.
John Hunter Nemechek’s LEGACY Motor Club Toyota will roll off sixth Sunday with Gibbs seventh and Noah Gragson eighth. Alex Bowman and defending Coca-Cola 600 winner Christopher Bell completed the top 10.
Four-time Coca-Cola 600 winner Jimmie Johnson – making his 700th NASCAR Cup Series start on Sunday – qualified 17th.
Ross Chastain crashed in practice on Saturday and did not post a time. Chastain will start 40th on Sunday.
