DARLINGTON, S.C. \u2014 Denny Hamlin won the pole for Sunday\u2019s Southern 500, the opening race of the Cup playoffs.<\/p>\n
Playoff drivers dominated Saturday\u2019s qualifying. The top 12 starting spots were claimed by playoff drivers. <\/p>\n
Hamlin won his second pole of the season and 46th of his career with a lap of 171.381 mph. This is his second career Darlington pole. He has won 40 poles with Toyota, becoming the first driver to do that for the manufacturer.<\/p>\n
Hamlin will be joined on the front row by Joe Gibbs Racing teammate Chase Briscoe, who won last year\u2019s Southern 500. Briscoe qualified at 171.255 mph.<\/p>\n
Josh Berry (170.578 mph) qualified third, followed by Tyler Reddick (170.466) and Kyle Larson (170.012).<\/p>\n
Playoff drivers took the top 12 spots and 13 of the top 14. The only playoff drivers starting 20th or worse are: Shane van Gisbergen (20th with a lap of 168.278 mph), Chase Elliott (21st with a lap of 168.261 mph) and Alex Bowman (29th with a lap of 168.014 mph). <\/p>\n
Justin Haley was the top non-playoff driver. He\u2019ll start 13th after a lap of 169.222 mph.<\/p>\n
The green flag is scheduled to wave at 6:05 p.m. ET Sunday on USA Network. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"DARLINGTON, S.C. \u2014 Denny Hamlin won the pole for Sunday\u2019s Southern 500, the opening race of the Cup…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":187597,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[1406,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-187596","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nascar","8":"tag-nascar","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115118702982909284","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187596"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187596\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}