For the second consecutive year, Jake Garcia impressed with a pole-winning run in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series at Rockingham Speedway. However, this time around may have been even more impressive due to the massive margin that Garcia had over the runner-up qualifier on Friday afternoon.
The driver of the No. 98 ThorSport Racing Ford F-150 turned a blistering lap time of 21.893 seconds (154.570 mph), which was enough to score the pole position and defeat his own track qualifying record set a season ago.
Garcia’s lap was more than two-tenths-of-a-second faster than Tanner Gray, the next closest qualifier. In fact, the margin between Garcia’s lap and Gray’s was 0.208 seconds, a blowout by today’s standards.
“I mean, that’s super cool to break my record from last year,” Garcia said in his post-qualifying interview on FS2. “Really proud of my guys. I felt like we struggled with some things in practice, and slowly chipped away at our truck in the time we did have in practice today, and got it good for qualifying.”
Garcia will now look to finish one spot ahead of where he finished in last year’s race at Rockingham, as he captured a career-best second-place finish last year in this event.
Like Garcia, Gray, who has made 146 starts in his NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series career, is also looking for his first career win. The TRICON Garage driver will have a birdseye view of the front of the field at the start of Friday’s race, it’ll be up to him to capitalize on the track position.
Kaden Honeycutt nabbed the third starting spot for the Black’s Tire 200, and he will be joined in the second row of the starting grid by Rookie of the Year contender Cole Butcher, who turned in his most impressive lap of his rookie season thus far.
Layne Riggs, likely one of Honeycutt’s biggest rivals for the series championship, will start from the fifth position.
Ty Majeski, Corey Heim, Parker Eatmon, Landen Lewis, and Gio Ruggiero rounded out the top-10 qualifiers in Friday’s qualifying session.
Two drivers, Justin Carroll and Jonathan Shafer, missed the show. Carroll turned a lap time in qualifying, which was too slow to advance to the starting lineup, while Shafer crashed his No. 69 MBM Motorsports Ford F-150 in the opening lap of practice earlier in the day.
