NSCS: Kurt Busch wins Duck Commander 500 pole as SHR sweeps front row

Since returning to the seat of the racecar, he’s been fast. That stayed true on Friday evening as Kurt Busch would win the pole for the Duck Commander 500. Busch scored his second pole of the season with a lap of 27.857 seconds.

“Everything is so tight in qualifying and I wanted to try and run the same time each time out,” he commented. “With the track continuing to change, everybody chipped in. The guys here at the track, the guys back at the sop – everybody chipped in and that’s what this is all about – getting that little extra. Now we just need to dial it in and get that long run speed out of the car.”

Kevin Harvick would qualify second, two hundreths off of Busch’s time, to give Stewart-Haas Racing a sweep of the front row.

“The car is really good,” he said. “The guys did a good job, and we stuck to our plan. We made one qualifying run and then spent the second half of practice focused on race runs. The car was really good and I’m looking forward to the race. Just really proud of everyone at Stewart-Haas Racing with the 41 team getting the pole, and my 4 team getting the outside front row. If you look at the top 12, there’s a lot of Hendrick chassis and engines, so that says a lot.”

Brad Keselowski qualified third after almost failing to transfer from round one to round two, followed by Kasey Kahne. Kahne led the final practice session. Jimmie Johnson would round out the top-five.

Joey Logano qualified sixth, followed by Ryan Newman, Paul Menard, Kyle Larson, Jamie McMurray, Tony Stewart and Jeff Gordon. Notably, no Toyotas made the top 12 as Carl Edwards was the highest in 16th. Other notables include Dale Earnhardt Jr. qualifying 25th, followed by A.J. Allmendinger and Clint Bowyer. David Ragan would qualify 27th as he continues to fill-in for Kyle Busch.

“For setting on the pole, it doesn’t compare well. But our Camry is really good – I was really happy in both practices, and thought I had a good racecar,” he said. “We’re scratching our heads with how it happened. We were really loose on our mock qualifying run and ran out of tires with our race runs so that probably hurt us. We probably went too far on our adjustments, so that’s disappointing.”

Brendan Gaughan and Jeb Burton would fail to qualify for the Duck Commander 500.