The focus this weekend at Martinsville Speedway will understandably be on the Playoff battles in the NASCAR National Series ranks as all three series will set their Championship 4 fields at the 0.526-mile short track. However, on Friday, it was two NASCAR Xfinity Series non-Playoff drivers who stole the show in qualifying.
Parker Retzlaff, the driver of the No. 31 Jordan Anderson Racing Chevrolet Camaro collected his second pole of the season with a qualifying time of 19.901 seconds (95.151 mph) in Friday’s qualifying session for Saturday’s National Debt Relief 250.
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After a rough middle portion of the 2024 NASCAR Xfinity Series season, Retzlaff feels he and his team are starting to hit their stride once again.
“I think once everything has kind of been going how it should be, we’ve shown a lot of speed,” Retzlaff said after his qualifying run. “We started the year really strong, and kind of went through a rough patch. We qualified on pole at Richmond at the beginning of the year, and I feel like the short tracks have been really good [for us].”
Retzlaff was encouraged by his team’s prep work in the simulator heading into this week’s race, and the great effort in the sim translated into solid results in qualifying.
“Had a lot of trust in our sim the last two weeks, and I made a joke to the guys on Tuesday that I felt like our sim the last two weeks was going really good. I felt like we had a really good chance to go get the pole,” Retzlaff explained. “So, I’m glad I could stand on it.”
Anthony Alfredo, another non-Playoff driver, secured the runner-up spot on the starting grid with a qualifying lap of 19.913 seconds, just 0.012 seconds off of the time set by Retzlaff. For the driver of the No. 5 Our Motorsports Chevrolet, this is his best qualifying effort of the season.
Chandler Smith was the fastest qualifying NASCAR Xfinity Series Playoff driver in the third position with his No. 81 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota GR Supra. Smith will be joined in Row 2 by fellow Playoff contender Jesse Love, who drives the No. 2 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet.
Justin Allgaier, Austin Hill, Sammy Smith, Sheldon Creed, Aric Almirola, and Cole Custer rounded out the top-10 qualifiers in the session.
Here is the starting position for all eight of the NASCAR Xfinity Series Playoff contenders (cutline deficit in parenthesis):
Chandler Smith (-28 points), 3rd
Jesse Love (-35), 4th
Justin Allgaier (+35), 5th
Austin Hill (LOCKED IN), 6th
Sammy Smith (-95), 7th
Cole Custer (+28), 10th
AJ Allmendinger (LOCKED IN), 11th
Sam Mayer (-47), 12th
Ryan Sieg suffered a pinched brake line in NASCAR Xfinity Series practice earlier in the afternoon and was unable to make a qualifying lap in the session. The driver of the No. 28 RSS Racing Ford Mustang Dark Horse will start from the rear of the field on Saturday at Martinsville Speedway.
