Kenseth Sets Track Record, Wins Pole at Darlington
May 8, 20098:18 PM
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,
with the prerace show set to begin at 7:00 p.m. on FOX.
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