Car Deals

Concord, NC, United States (AHN) – Four-time NASCAR Sprint Cup Series champion Jeff Gordon scored his first pole of the season Thursday night at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Now, with six races left in The Chase, he just needs to get that first win of the season.

With a 59-race winless streak, Gordon scored his first pole since Nov. 8, 2009 in Texas Thursday night when he captured the pole for Saturday night’s Bank of America 500.

“Oh, I’m telling you. This was huge and a huge shock. We just have not been qualifying good this year and as you mentioned, we haven’t qualified this well in Charlotte for 10 years. And I felt like there was a time when we were almost the pole king, like Ryan Newman lately,” said Gordon.

“When it comes to Charlotte we used to qualify so well here but competition and cars and different things change over the years, we just sort of lost our way here. I’ll be honest. Today, the way it was going, I didn’t think we had any shot at this pole.”

With a lap of 191.544 mph, Gordon tallied his 69th career pole, tying for third on the all-time list with three-time champion Cale Yarborough.

Gordon edged fellow Chaser Carl Edwards (191.455 mph) for the top and the twosome were followed by A.J. Allmendinger (190.921 mph), Mark Martin (190.914 mph) and Paul Menard (190.678 mph).

“The 43 team has been fast unloading the last few weeks and in qualifying the last couple of weeks we just kind of lost it a little bit,” said Allmendiner. “I’m not very good around here, so when I threw that lap down, it felt good but there was so much grip on the race track you didn’t really know how good the car was.”

The other Chase drivers to land among the top-10 qualifiers were Kyle Busch (sixth) and Jimmie Johnson (10th), while Denny Hamlin qualified 23rd, one position ahead of Kevin Harvick.

Kurt Busch began, looking for a three-race sweep at Charlotte, qualified 15th and the other Chaser qualifiers were: Matt Kenseth (17th), Jeff Burton (18th), Clint Bowyer (20th), Greg Biffle (22nd) and Tony Stewart (29th).

“Not the lap we were looking for but we’ve had our struggles here before. We were tight in practice and tight on that lap also,” said Hamlin. “We know what changes we are going to make for practice and we’ll turn it around tomorrow and be ready for Saturday.”

Joe Nemechek, Casey Mears, Mike Bliss, Jason Leffler, Kevin Conway and Johnny Sauter all failed to qualify for the 43-car field.

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