Jeff Gordon, driver of the #24 Drive To End Hunger Chevrolet, his crew chief, Alan Gustafson, Jimmie Johnson, driver of the #48 Lowe’s Chevrolet, and his crew chief, Chad Knaus, pose with the Daytona 500 Pole Award and Front Row Award after qualifying for the pole position and front row for the 57th Annual Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway on February 15, 2015 Photo – Robert Laberge/Getty Images
The Sprint Cup Series Qualifying session produced more emotion than anyone imagined and amid some crashing and controversy over the new format, Jeff Gordon took the Pole for Sunday’s Daytona 500 on February 22, televised on FOX at 1 pm ET.
This is Gordon’s 78th pole in 762 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series starts and he becomes the first pole winner to eclipse 200 miles an hour since 1987.
“This is definitely huge for many reasons,” said the four-time Cup champion, Jeff Gordon. “This is one I’ve been stressing about for a while. This format is crazy and chaotic. It can be extremely rewarding when you have a day like we had.
“To bring that kind of group effort together…
In the past, this has been one of the easiest days I’ve had all day long. Go out there, hold it wide open, run a couple laps. It’s all about the team, the car, all the preparation they put into it. All that hard work still goes into this effort, but I play a bigger role, the spotter plays a bigger role. There’s just so much more strategy in trying to play this chess match and the time game, the wait game. It just becomes really intense.
“Yeah, this feels good for that reason alone. Then you add that it’s the Daytona 500, the benefits that come along with that, as well as it just being the Daytona 500, the emotion of the announcement I made to start the season, this is my last Daytona 500, this is a very special day.”
Sharing the front row with Gordon is his teammate and six-time series’ champion, Jimmie Johnson.
“Yeah, it’s nice to be locked in on Thursday for the Duels,” said Johnson. “You don’t have to take any big risks or chances. It’s nice to know we’ve got a great starting spot for the 500.
“We’ll enjoy the week. More so on an emotional level this sends a big thank you back to all our folks back at Hendrick Motorsports at all the different shops and departments. They’ve been working hard to get our cars ready for the season. To get a front row sweep says a lot.
“The only way the drivers can really thank everybody for their hard work is to go out and stand on it. We did a nice job working the qualifying sessions like we needed to to advance and knocked down that front row.”
The event was not without some controversy over the new qualifying format, used at Daytona for the first time. Most critical was Clint Bowyer who has a demolished car, courtesy of an multi-car incident in the first few minutes of the first five-minute round of qualifying.
“First of all, I wasn’t behind the 44 (Sorenson),” said a livid Clint Bowyer upon his release from the in-field care center at Daytona. “He comes flying around, comes up on the apron, jumps in front of me, then runs over the 51, stacks us all up and I run into him.
“It’s idiotic to be out here doing this anyway. There’s no sense in trying to put on some cute show for whatever the hell this is. Then you’ve got a guy out there in desperation doing this crap like this. There’s no reason to be out here. These guys have spent six months working on these cars, busting their (rears) on these cars, to go out there and have some guy out of desperation do that crap.
“But it ain’t his fault. It’s not. It’s NASCAR’s fault for putting us out here in the middle of this crap for nothing. We used to come down here and worry about who was going to sit on the front row and the pole for the biggest race of the year. Now all we do is come down here and worry about how a start-and-park like this out of desperation is going to knock us out of the Daytona 500. We’ve been at meetings for 45 minutes just to try and figure out what in the hell everyone is going to do, just so we can make the race. It’s stupid. There’s no sense in doing this. ”
In addition to Bowyer and Reed Sorenson, others involved were Denny Hamlin, JJ Yeley, Bobby Labonte and Justin Allgaier. Sorenson hit the back of Justin Allgaier’s No. 51, sending his car up the track and in a chain reaction, caught Bowyer’s car in the mêlée.
Reed Sorenson says, he was blocking as he saw Kenseth do to win the Sprint Unlimited and didn’t intend to cause the wreck.
“Just a product of this qualifying, trying to get that one lap,” said Sorenson. “I didn’t want it to end that way, that’s for sure. I apologize to all the guys. Try to get a car here and try to get in the race on Thursday.”
For 15 minutes, 43 seconds, there was a delay of the first round, leaving only a minute and 22 seconds left in the session. On the restart, the remaining cars in the group, failed to leave pit road in time to complete a full-lap, thus their times did not count toward qualifying.
In post-race interviews, Steve O’Donnell, NASCAR chief racing development officer and executive vice president gave his comments about the qualifying format and controversy.
“I think as everybody knows, this format was put together by NASCAR with feedback from the industry, but ultimately to be as exciting as possible,” said the O’Donnell.
“We used it last year in Daytona for the summer race. We made some adjustments from there. Going into Talladega, obviously learned throughout that. Then came into Daytona with some minor adjustments for the Daytona 500, as well.
“So if you look at group qualifying as a whole, we felt it worked really well, but certainly there’s some challenges on superspeedways. One of the reasons we moved away from single-car qualifying, I think you’ve heard from the drivers as well, a lot of things go into it as well, aero packages, different setups, not based on a race setup. You also heard Jeff Gordon talk about putting it back in the drivers’ hands more. That’s something we like.
“We don’t want to see wrecks of any kind. Not lost on us how much work goes into these cars by the teams, the efforts for our biggest race of the year.
“I close by saying I believe we’ve got a really good track record of making adjustments where we need to, so we’ll certainly evaluate what took place today, we’ll continue to get feedback from the industry, from the drivers as we did to get to where we were today.
“Lastly, we just want to say a big congratulations to Jeff Gordon. His last Daytona 500. We’re excited to see him lead us off on the pole position as we lead into next Sunday’s race.”
The Budweiser Duel at Daytona races are on Thursday, February 19, at 7 pm and televised on Fox Sports 1. The Daytona 500 is Sunday, February 22, at 1 pm and televised on FOX.