LAS VEGAS — Christopher Bell won the pole for Sunday’s Pennzoil 400 NASCAR Cup Series race during qualifying Saturday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.
Bell’s Joe Gibbs Racing No. 20 Toyota ran a lap of 28.853 seconds at 187.156 mph to claim his first pole of the season and the second of his Cup Series career.
It’s Bell’s fourth pole in 13 races at the 1.5-mile race track.
“I didn’t know what last time I was going to run, but just from practice, I think in practice, what I read, like at 29.30, so a half a second pickup is, I think is pretty much in line with what we normally pick up from practice to race trim, so from that standpoint, I don’t think it was a surprising lap time, but to beat the field by over a 10th is something that’s not very, you don’t see that very often,” Bell said. “So just goes to show that my engineers, my crew chief, my mechanics, they executed really well.
“The Toyotas clearly have plenty of speed in them, and whenever I kept seeing Toyota after Toyota go and jump to the top of the pylon, I knew that we were going to be in position, so you have a good lap, and then thankfully, I didn’t make any mistakes on my lap, and my team did their job, and we got rewarded for it.”
Bell’s teammates Denny Hamlin and Ty Gibbs qualified second and third.
Bubba Wallace was fourth in a 23XI Racing Toyota, while Kyle Larson rounded out the top five in a Henrick Motorsports Chevrolet.
Ryan Blaney (Ford), Tyler Reddick (Toyota), Ryan Preece (Ford), William Byron (Chevrolet) and Chris Buescher (Ford) rounded out the top 10.