MARTINSVILLE, Va. — Martin Truex Jr. may be out of the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs, but the veteran driver still has compelling goals, as he proved with a pole-winning run on Saturday at Martinsville Speedway.
After a final-round lap at 96.190 mph (19.686 seconds), Truex will start from the top spot in Sunday’s Xfinity 500 (2 p.m. ET on NBC, MRN and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
Behind him and next to him, six Playoff drivers, led by second-place starter Chase Elliott, will begin their battle for the final two positions in the Nov. 10 Championship 4 Race at Phoenix Raceway.
And at the opposite end of the spectrum, Playoff driver Denny Hamlin, Truex’s teammate, will start from the rear after a bizarre wreck in practice damaged his No. 11 Toyota, preventing him from making a qualifying run.
“I feel great about our car on stickers (new tires),” said Truex, who was 0.049 seconds faster than third-place starter William Byron, who posted a lap at 95.951 mph (19.735 seconds) in the final round. “You never want to get too optimistic, but I fired off really good in practice, especially that second run with the track rubbered-in.
“I was like ‘If we can just hit the balance here for qualifying, it should be really fast.’ “
Earlier this season, Truex announced he will retire from full-time racing at season’s end.
“We’ve got two more chances to win,” said Truex, who earned his third pole at Martinsville, his first of the season and the 24th of his career. “We want it bad, we’re working hard, we’re not giving up and, hopefully, we can get it for everyone.”
Though he was fifth fastest in the final round, Elliott starts second because he was the fastest of the five qualifiers in Group A. That left Byron third, Chase Briscoe fourth and Ty Gibbs fifth.
Harrison Burton, Alex Bowman, Ryan Preece, Kyle Larson and Austin Dillon will start from positions six through 10, respectively. The three Hendrick Motorsports drivers — Elliott, Byron and Larson — are the only Playoff drivers in the top 10 on the grid.
Other Playoff drivers qualified as follows: Joey Logano 12th, Ryan Blaney 14th, Christopher Bell 16th and Tyler Reddick 31st. Logano and Reddick already have qualified for the Championship 4 with respective victories at Las Vegas and Homestead-Miami.
As qualifying progressed, Hamlin’s crew was trying to repair his primary car, which backed into the Turn 3 wall when the throttle stuck during practice, thanks to a chunk of rubber that found its way into the throttle body.
“We had just come back out, we had just made an adjustment to the car, and it was doing everything it needed to do,” Hamlin said. “It was maneuvering through the pack pretty well. I went into Turn 3, and the car just didn’t slow down, and the throttle hung on us. The throttle had no chance to come backwards.
“That certainly caught me off guard, but it happens. We just got unlucky.”
Truex was sympathetic to his teammate’s misfortune but wasn’t worried about a similar circumstance on his car.
“About as much as I’m concerned about getting hit by lightning,” Truex quipped. “One-in-a-million. I don’t know how — his number just came up.”
