NASCAR Cup
Darlington: Matt Kenseth qualifying report
Kenseth Sets Track Record, Wins Pole at Darlington Darlington, S.C. (May 8, 2009) -- Matt Kenseth will lead the field to green for tomorrow night's Southern 500 at historic Darlington (S.C) Speedway. Kenseth won his fourth career Sprint Cup pole ...
Published: Jun 19, 2009, 7:54 PM
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Kenseth Sets Track Record, Wins Pole at Darlington
Darlington, S.C. (May 8, 2009) -- Matt Kenseth will lead the field to green for tomorrow night's Southern 500 at historic Darlington (S.C) Speedway. Kenseth won his fourth career Sprint Cup pole and his first since 2005 in grand fashion, capturing the Darlington track record with a time of 27.394 (179.514 mph) around the 1.366-mile egg shaped oval known as the 'track too tough to tame."
"It was a great lap for us," said Kenseth in the post qualifying press conference. "You can only go as fast as the car will carry you and (crew chief) Drew (Blickensderfer) and (team engineer) Chip (Bolin) and all these guys on the DEWATL team did a great job of giving me a fast car today, so I'm really looking forward to tomorrow night. We've had a lot of speed in our car all day today, which has been real encouraging. We made a lot of changes on our car today. We've been able to make it worse and we've been able to make it better and kind of feel what was going on, so I felt really good about that. Our mock-up run was actually really fast. I didn't think we'd have a serious shot at the pole, but our car was driving really good and, actually, for once when it quit raining I was glad that we got to qualify today."
"I hope we'll race good tomorrow night," added Kenseth. "We really worked on race setup all day and really didn't work on qualifying setup very well. After we got done with race practice, you never know -- today doesn't really mean a ton for tomorrow -- but it's the most confident I've been in my car since I don't know when. It's the best car we've had all year by far in practice. Now practice doesn't really necessarily mean what it's going do for 500 miles that night when you're practicing in the middle of the day, but the car really responded well to changes today and it drove probably better than any COT I've ever driven up to this point, so I feel pretty good about it. I'm a lot more confident than I have been the last couple months."
Green flag for tomorrow night's Southern 500 is set for 7:35 p.m. EDT.
-credit: rfr
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