Christopher Bell claims NASCAR Cup pole at Kansas Speedway

Christopher Bell hasn’t lost a pole at Kansas since the spring of 2023, and he will again lead the field to the green flag on Sunday. At a 30.111s, he bested teammate Ty Gibbs by 0.040s off in a front row sweep for for the Joe Gibbs Racing camp.

It was Bell’s 12th career pole and his second of the 2024 season.

“I’ll tell you what, it’s the people that work on this race car that made the statement,” said Bell, crediting his team with the fast lap. “Today, we showed up with probably our best Kansas car we’ve ever had. It’s always been a great track for us to qualify at and it seems like whenever we go race, we’re always like that third to seventh range. Today, it was different. It felt really, really good in practice. I felt really comfortable driving the car. And then they were able to duplicate the qualifying balance.”

Kyle Busch clocked in third for his best qualifying effort since Dover in May. Tyler Reddick and Joey Logano rounded out the top-five. William Byron, Ryan Blaney, Denny Hamlin, Chase Briscoe, and Daniel Suarez filled out the remainder of the top-ten.

Playoff drivers starting deeper in the pack: Kyle Larson (11th); Alex Bowman (12th); Austin Cindric (17th); Chase Elliott (38th).

There were no incidents during qualifying and all drivers set a time. 

Round 1

In Group A, Gibbs was the only non-playoff driver to advance. Byron was the fastest driver with a 30.220s lap. Reddick was the final driver to move on, beating Bowman by over a tenth.

Elliott was slowest of all drivers, running off the pace with an engine issue. He will swap engines before the race start, and the No. 9 Hendrick team knew about the issue before qualifying. They only sent him out on track so they can use that set of tires as scuffs during the race. If he had opted out of qualifying, he would have had to use his practice scuffs, which had more laps on them.

In Group B,  Bell led the way with a blistering fast lap of 30.043s. Busch was the only non-playoff driver to advance while Briscoe eked his way into the final round. He bested title favorite Larson for the final spot, running 0.060s quicker.