Harvick scores sixth pole of the year

Kevin Harvick has taken pole position in Atlanta, but the focus of attention was on his team boss Tony Stewart who will start 12th.

With qualifying run in the early evening ahead of the Oral-B USA 500, drivers looked for cloud cover to make their runs in three rounds of knock-out qualifying.

Harvick was the best in the final round and will start alongside Brad Keselowski with Kyle Larson, Ryan Newman and Matt Kenseth rounding out the top-5.

It was Harvick’s second-straight week or scoring a pole and his sixth of the season.

“Our car didn’t really change that much,” said Harvick.

“I just messed the first round up really bad trying to do something that I wasn’t doing in practice. Luckily we were fast enough to be able to get through the first round into the second round. The second round we got into a little better rhythm where I wanted to run on the race track.

“I’ve got to thank everybody on our Jimmy John’s team they make my life a lot easier on Friday’s and this is a lot of fun.”

After earlier fronting the media, Tony Stewart returned to the race seat in the afternoon and after setting the 10th fastest time in first practice, his time 12th fastest time in qualifying will make him a driver to watch in the race.

Also fast in practice was Marcos Ambrose who was third quickest in a session where he was concentrating on a race set-up. However, he described his car as tight in qualifying and will start from 32nd in the race.

“The car was really tight and we just didn’t have what we needed for qualifying,” said Ambrose.

“But, we did have a great practice and feel good in race trim.  We worked on that today and we feel good for Sunday.”

With 44 cars entered into this weekend’s event, Michael McDowell was the only car that did not qualify for Sunday’s race.

This weekend’s race is the penultimate event before the 10-race Chase for the Sprint Cup.

QUALIFYING: Oral-B USA 500 – Atlanta Motor Speedway