NASCAR: Qualifying falls flat as Austin Dillon holds on for pole at Auto Club Speedway
Photo by Robert Laberge/Getty Images)
FONTANA, Calif.—What if NASCAR held qualifying and no one showed up?
That’s not exactly how time trials evolved at Auto Club Speedway on Friday, but with just a minute remaining in the Round 2 only Kurt Busch had completed a lap.
The high-speed game of chicken continued with Austin Dillon topping the speed chart followed by Kevin Harvick, Aric Almirola, Kyle Busch, Joey Logano, Denny Hamlin, Ryan Newman, Chase Elliott, Clint Bowyer, Ryan Blaney Jimmie Johnson and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. all advancing to the final round.
Once the five-minute clock started ticking to signal Round 3, there was no last man standing. Not a single driver rolled off of pit road with enough time to make it back to the start/finish line and start a lap that counted. And that was perfectly OK with Dillon.
“It came down to Round 2 and putting the placement right,” said Dillon who earned his fourth-career Cup pole. “Andy Houston (spotter) did a great job. We didn’t panic. And, that ended up putting us in a great position for Round 3.
“I’m really happy for our guys and everybody back at the shop, who has been working really hard. We’ve been frustrated the last couple of weeks because we’ve had fast cars and not gotten the finishes, so this definitely feels good.”
While the moment felt good for Dillon, the optics weren’t satisfactory from the stands.
“I think the crowd booing tells the story,” Harvick said.
NASCAR was equally frustrated. What did Senior Vice President of Competition Scott Miller witness?
“I saw obviously what our fans don’t want,” Miller said. “Having the last 12 cars wait until they couldn’t get a time posted on the board and kind of making a mockery out of qualifying is not what we expect for our fans.
“It’s a little bit on us that we hoped things would go better than that. It’s an exciting show out there on the race track. But obviously, we have a little bit of work to do on our part to get a little better format so things like that can’t happen. We certainly want to provide our fans with what they deserve and we and the teams didn’t do a very good job of that today. So we’re disappointed.”
The confusion really started in the first round. Chase Elliott spun on the back stretch and the session was delayed to clean up the track. When the session returned to green with seven minutes and 32 seconds remaining, teams weren’t sure whether their laps counted or not.
Among the drivers bumped from contention was last year’s pole sitter and race winner Martin Truex Jr., who will roll off 27th on Sunday.
“Since he was just leaving the pits, he ran high to get his momentum up like normal and just missed the bottom there and that obviously hurt our speed there off three and four,” Truex said. “It's unfortunate, we missed it today off the hauler. We were pretty tight in practice and then we were way too loose there.
“We were just on both sides of it. We’ve been struggling a little bit on Fridays, but I know we’ll be right tomorrow and we’ll have some cars to pass Sunday, but I know we can do it.”
Truex’s teammate Hamlin didn’t want to be the first driver to leave pit road. However, that’s the risk a driver takes. If he’s not among the first to go, he could get boxed in and post no time at all.
“No, it’s not a mind game but you don’t want to be first,” Hamlin said. “When you don’t want to be first, you wait until someone goes in front of you…If you are the first in line, you aren’t going to get the pole unless you time it perfectly. We’re not that good.
“I knew I had a drop-down time on my dash. But I was boxed in where I couldn’t go. Once everyone left pit road, they then checked up and slowed down. I knew we weren’t going to make it.”
Kyle Busch’s solution? Single-file qualifying similar to what the Gander Outdoor Truck Series was forced to institute. Unless something changes, Busch expects similar results on any intermediate track or larger.
“I’m sure it will happen again,” Busch said. “If the rules stay the way they are then it’s going to happen again. It happened in Las Vegas, there was four guys or three guys that had their time disallowed there.”
Miller anticipates NASCAR will adjust the rules prior to qualifying at Texas Motor Speedway on March 29th.
“I think we will definitely make some tweaks to it,” Miller said. “Not quite sure what, we’ve been working on a few other things but we really don’t want to go back to single-file qualifying. There may not be another way but we want to try and exhaust every possibility before we do that because it’s not as fun, not as intriguing of a show as the group situation.
“We’re going to try and figure out a way to adjust the group qualifying thing and not go back to single, but we have some work to do before that.”
Our Partners
.png)
