Chris Trotman/Getty Images for NASCAR
Matt Kenseth, who is not known as the best qualifier, took his new team and his new Toyota and won the pole for the STP 400 at Kansas Speedway. This is only Matt’s ninth pole in 480 NASCAR Sprint Cup starts.
Matt said, “It’s not me, it’s everybody at TRD (Toyota Racing Development), JGR (Joe Gibbs Racing) and Jason Ratcliff (crew chief) and the boys. Thank Home Depot, Husky Tools and Dollar General. This thing was kind of a struggle most of the day. I felt like I wasn’t giving Jason really the best feedback and they made awesome adjustments for qualifying — it was pretty bad to the bone.”
Matt Kenseth wasn’t the fastest in the first practice but he wasn’t exactly slow. He was the seventh fastest but the difference between Carl Edwards (1st in practice) and Matt was only 1.26 MPH slower.
Kasey Kahne running on the new track surface last fall set a new track record of 191.360 MPH; Matt Kenseth was able to blow that away with a lap of 191.864 mph.
Typically Matt Kenseth and his team had picked the last pit stall on pit lane. Something tells me that his team will pick the first pit stall like most team do, the one that got Kyle Bush the win last week. That may be a problem for Matt because he may have only had that stall nine times in his career.
When asked about his change in qualifying prowess Matt said, “Through the years it’s probably become more important. I think that the cars are more equal. I think if you want to go way back in time, there’s times where we never had qualifying engines, we just didn’t do a lot of that stuff that a lot of people really put a lot of time, money and effort into. In the days when I started, they just didn’t do that stuff over there. Then I think certainly when they went to impound races there was a big bump in our qualifying because everyone basically qualified what they raced and our race package was usually pretty good. I think that was a big bump in our starting position. The COT stuff and even this car, when we would race decent, we would usually qualify pretty decent, but if we were off all weekend then we wouldn’t qualify that well. I think everybody is a little more equal and we just have better cars and better qualifying setups.”
OK that quote leaves little to be desired. I don’t normally do this but I will try and translate. I think Matt said, When I was at Roush Fenway with the other cars qualifying wasn’t important especially with the older cars. The newer cars are more equal so doing well in qualifying isn’t such a big deal.
Carl Edwards will start second, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. third, Sam Hornish Jr. fourth and Kyle Busch fifth.
Joe Nemechek was slowest and will miss the race.
If you cannot get to Kansas Speedway the race will be televised on FOX on Sunday, April 21st at 12:30 PM ET.
Brian Berg Jr. is a NASCAR writer for www.RantSports.com.
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