Jesse Love will start on the pole for Friday night's Food City 300 at Bristol Motor Speedway after inclement weather canceled qualifying for the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series race.
BRISTOL, TENN. -- Jesse Love will start on the pole for Friday night's Food City 300 at Bristol Motor Speedway after inclement weather canceled qualifying for the NASCAR O'Reilly Auto Parts Series race.
Love will start on the front row with current points leader Sheldon Creed. They finished 1-2 at World Wide Technology Raceway Gateway, boosting them to 1-2 to start Friday night's NOAPS race.
Creed's Haas Factory teammate, Sam Mayer, will start third. Carson Kvapil, Taylor Gray, Brent Crews, Parker Retzlaff, Sammy Smith, Justin Allgaier and Rajah Caruth round out the top-10 starters.
Qualifying get canceled resulted in Landon S. Huffman and his No. 43 Alpha Prime Racing Chevrolet missing the field.
Brandon Jones, who was fastest in practice, will start 11th. He is one of three Chase drivers starting outside of the top-10.
Austin Hill will start 20th after issues throughout the race at Gateway, including in the final run of the race. Meanwhile, Corey Day avoided any penalties for his incident with William Sawalich but caught the real penalty: Starting 26th in Friday night's race, while Sawalich will start 16th.
In practice, Sawalich's organization -- Joe Gibbs Racing -- showed speed with Jones and teammate Brent Crews topping the charts overall (15.943, 15.971).
Jesse Love (15.972), Austin Hill (15.976), Ryan Sieg (15.982), Justin Allgaier (16.000), Anthony Alfredo (16.005), Parker Retzlaff (16.016), Sam Mayer (16.022) and William Sawalich (16.036) rounded out the top-10 fastest drivers overall.
On the 10-lap average, Mayer was the fastest (118.954 mph average), ahead of Sieg (118.776 mph), Taylor Gray (118.558 mph), Alfredo (118.544 mph), Love (118.477 mph), Jones (118.475 mph), Allgaier (118.395 mph), Hill (118.391), Day (118.211 mph) and Sawalich (118.101 mph).
Weather could be a factor going into Friday night's race. It canceled practice and qualifying for the NASCAR Cup Series race, giving them even less time than the NOAPS drivers to prepare and set themselves up well for their race, set for Saturday night.
The NOAPS race is set to go green Friday, just after 7:30 p.m. ET, on The CW, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio Channel 90 and PRN affiliates.
In the spring, JR Motorsports dominated. The No. 88 car dominated with Kyle Larson at the wheel. Then, the No. 1 car took the win with Connor Zilisch driving.
Come hopefully Friday night, the No. 88 car will have Rajah Caruth driving and the No. 1 car will have Carson Kvapil driving. Kvapil is looking for his third win of the season and is nine points behind leader Sheldon Creed, while Caruth is looking for his first win and is much farther back in the championship hunt.
