Last year’s Quaker State 400 at Kentucky Speedway was a family affair for the Busch family, with Kurt Busch taking the win and eventual 2019 NASCAR Cup Series champion Kyle Busch finishing second to his older brother. The 2020 edition of the yearly Kentcky Speedway race will begin with reigning series champion Kyle Busch on the pole and older brother Kurt Busch in the fourth row in the seventh position. Kyle Busch, still in search of his first win of the year after 16 races acquired the pole in a drawing among the top-12 teams in Cup Series owner points standings.
“It was a great finish to the race, just wish I was the one that came out on top,” Kyle Busch said of last year’s race. “On the last lap, I knew I cleared him into [turn] three, and if I just stayed in the gas, I was never going to make the exit. I was going to plow the fence. Maybe I should have just gotten in front of him and messed up his air. I missed my chance over there, I guess, and that’s about all I could really have done differently. Hoping we’ll have a chance to bring home a win this time around with our M&Ms Fudge Brownie Camry.”
Busch is a two-time winner at Kentucky Speedway.
“It’s pretty nice to be able to go to these race tracks and be able to have the opportunity to do well and run well and finish up front and win,” Busch said. “You look at Bristol, you look at Richmond, you look at Kentucky, you’ll see we’ve been doing a hell of a lot better, and it’s been really good to go to these places and have the consistency that we need to run up front like that. Kentucky, though, when we first started going there, I remember going there in the ARCA days and the Xfinity days, back when the asphalt was old, rough and bumpy. Then they ground it a couple times and it kind of changed a little bit. I kept up with the changes, and then, now it’s all repaved, and we’re still trying to work in the surface a bit.”
Busch will share the front row with Joey Logano. From the second position on the starting grid, Logano is the first of three-consecutive Ford starters and four in the first three rows of the grid. Stewart-Haas Racing swept second-row starting positions in the drawing, with Kevin Harvick in the third starting spot and Aric Almirola the fourth.
Alex Bowman will start fifth, sharing the third row with another Ford driver, Logano’s Team Penske teammate Brad Keselowski.
Other top-10 starters include Chase Elliott in eighth, Martin Truex Jr. in ninth and Matt DiBenedetto in 10th.
Denny Hamlin, who shares 2020 winningest driver honors with Harvick, each with four wins, drew the last spot among the top-12.
“It has cycled around to the two of us for several weeks, now,” Harvick said. “I think, as you look at that, it definitely makes it fun. You want to have the upper hand on the who finishes in front of who ratio at this point, especially because if that’s the guy you’re racing and the team you’re racing. You want to at least stay even par. Those guys are good. They’re doing a great job, obviously, leading the charge at Joe Gibbs. Our guys are doing the same. On days when you think you’re out of it, you keep grinding. All of a sudden, you wind up in victory lane; those are the days you smile, because you know everybody did their job and kept themselves in the game.”
Just as a drawing among the top-12 teams determined the order of the top-12 starters, similar drawings also set the 13th through 24th and 25th through 36th starting spots. The final two positions on the 38-car grid went to the two drivers with open, or non-chartered, teams, Daniel Suarez and Timmy Hill.
