Qualified: No. 3 (lane choice)
The Competition: No. 14 Richie Crampton
The Results:
Q1: 4.648 E.T. at 169.00 MPH
Q2: 3.832 E.T. at 319.67 MPH (One bonus point for third quickest run of the session)
Q3: 4.077 E.T. at 266.85 MPH (One bonus point for third quickest run of the session)
Q4: 6.694 E.T. at 100.82 MPH
Bonus Points: Two
Quotable:
“Well, we were third-quick in the first session today and I think if I could’ve legged it down there, we could’ve been No. 1 or No. 2 for the session. We’ve just been working on picking it up and it picked it up there, so it did what we wanted it to do but I was just a little bit fast. If I stayed in it, it might have made it, but I was on high alert because I didn’t want anything to go wrong. When it started rattling the tires, I just shut it off. But the car went quicker, so the good part is that we’re just building each and every run.
“This weekend, we did what we wanted to accomplish in qualifying – run something in the top-five, which we did by qualifying third. Tomorrow’s going to be a hot race day, and we know how to get down a hot race track. I have all the confidence in our team and our crew chiefs and I’m just ready to get on that horse, go out there and do what we do. Stay calm, focused and poised and go out and have fun tomorrow. That’s going to be the name of the game. It’s going to be a challenging race for everybody, but I firmly believe, and I have all the confidence in the world that our Matco Tools/U.S. Army team will go out there and make it ‘do what it do,’ like Ray Charles says.”