Chase Briscoe, crew chief James Small, and the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing team have qualifying figured out. That can’t be debated as Briscoe collected his sixth pole position of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season Saturday afternoon at Iowa Speedway.
The native of Mitchell, IN, earned his fifth pole over his last 11 starts on the strength of a 23.004-second (136.933 mph) lap around the 0.875-mile track in Newton, IA. The lap clocked in 0.084 seconds faster than William Byron, the runner-up qualifier, which allowed Briscoe to head to a familiar place — posing with the Busch Light Pole Award flag.
NASCAR Cup Series Iowa Results:
Briscoe who has one win this season, which came at Pocono Raceway in June, hopes he can have his finishing position match his starting position in Sunday’s Iowa Corn 350 Powered by Ethanol.
“Yeah, it’s definitely been great on Saturdays for our Bass Pro Shops Toyota, would love to convert that to Sundays,” Briscoe quipped. “We’ve been fast on Sundays, too, just haven’t been able to obviously come out on top. But yeah, just James [Small], the entire group does such a good job on this thing to just get it better. Starting off in practice today, we were not the best car. And we ended up getting it to third in practice, and then, obviously, really fast here in qualifying.”
It was a weird feeling for Briscoe on Saturday afternoon, as he felt like he left too much speed on the track to nab yet another pole position. In the end, it was indeed enough.
“I didn’t think that was going to hold. I figured it was going to be sixth or seventh. I was just a little too tight,” Briscoe explained. “I felt like I gave up a lot of time into [Turns] 1 and 2, and I knew my [Turns] 3 and 4 were good, but I didn’t think it would be enough. Really cool though to get another pole. Hopefully, can convert it to a win tomorrow.”
With his sixth pole of the season, Briscoe is now up to eight poles in his NASCAR Cup Series career.
Byron, who comes into this race just four points behind Chase Elliott for the NASCAR Cup Series regular-season point lead, said while he didn’t have anything for Briscoe in qualifying, he feels his crew chief Rudy Fugle was able to build some comfortability into his car throughout the day, and he likes how his car feels in race trim.
“I don’t know, man. That 19, they’ve got it figured out in qualifying, they do a good job. Yeah, I thought our car was good in race trim, you know, good there in qualifying. Just hard to feel,” Byron explained. “Getting across the bumps and everything, I didn’t have a great first lap, obviously, I had like a [23.]27 [second lap] or whatever. Tried to up everything for the second lap, and get more comfortable because I was just bouncing across the bumps.”
Kyle Larson, who was the final car to go on track in the session clocked in with the third-fastest qualifying time, and will start behind the front row of Briscoe and Byron. Austin Cindric will start alongside Larson in Row 2 on Sunday afternoon at Iowa Speedway.
Brad Keselowski, Ryan Blaney, Carson Hocevar, Chase Elliott, AJ Allmendinger, and Justin Haley rounded out the top-10 qualifiers for Sunday’s race.
Kyle Busch will start shotgun on the field (37th) in Sunday’s race in a backup car after his primary No. 8 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet got loose in Turns 1 and 2 during the 18th lap of practice earlier in the day. Busch attempted to gather his car up, but over-corrected, and shot hard head-on into the outside wall.
Fortunately, Busch was able to walk away from the carnage, but will have an uphill climb on Sunday if he hopes to erase a 79-race winless streak.
