Martin Truex Jr. qualified sixth and his Furniture Row Racing teammate Erik Jones qualified ninth for Sunday’s Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Truex will line up his No. 78 Auto-Owners Insurance Toyota Camry on the outside of Row 3 after a pole-round lap of 48.456 seconds at 185.736 mph around the 2.5-mile oval. It will be the best career starting position at IMS for Truex who qualified eighth in last year’s race.
“It was okay, I think this is the best I’ve ever qualified here, which is good, but a little disappointed,” said Truex. “I thought the Auto-Owners Insurance Camry was better than that after the second round and just made some tweaks – the guys made some really good adjustments for round three – and I just didn’t hit my marks. I messed up Turn 2 and cost us a lot of time down the backstretch, so I guess to be sixth is okay, but looking forward to hopefully doing better than that tomorrow.”
Jones will line up the No. 77 Sport Clips Toyota Camry on the inside of Row 5 after a pole-round lap of 48.677 at 184.892. It will be the first NASCAR Cup Series start at IMS for Jones who started second and finished 22nd in last year’s NASCAR XFINITY Series race.
“We had a good pole-round lap,” said Jones. “We kept trying to get the Sport Clips Toyota better and better each round, but just jumped the fence and went too free and kind of gave up a lot of time really in Turns 1 and 2.”
Kyle Busch won the pole. The balance of the top-12 qualifiers, in order, were: Kevin Harvick, Jamie McMurray, Jimmie Johnson, Denny Hamlin, Truex Jr., Joey Logano, Ryan Newman, Jones, Ryan Blaney, Brad Keselowski, and Kurt Busch.
Sunday’s Brickyard 400 will air live beginning at 12:30 p.m. MT (2:30 p.m. ET) on NBC, SiriusXM 90 and the IMS Radio Network.
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