Qualifying came to an odd ending for Brad Keselowski, who will start the Bank of America 500 at Charlotte Motor Speedway in the 13th position.
BK was just beyond the cutline, forcing him to take his black and blue No. 2 Detroit Genuine Parts Ford Fusion out for another lap in the second round. He crossed the start/finish line with the exact same time—down to the thousandth of a second—as Carl Edwards: 28.181 seconds.
The two drivers tied for the last spot in the final round, position 12, but the tiebreaker went back to the point total after the Challenger Round of the Chase for the Sprint Cup, so Edwards got the nod.
“We were 12th, it’s just that somebody else was 12th too,” Brad told NBC. “We’re 12B. We unloaded
[the car] today not real good, and then Paul Wolfe and the team worked on it and we’ve gotten a lot better from where we unloaded. So I’m pretty optimistic, but still certainly want to be a little bit faster. We’ll keep working on it. We’ve got a day of practice tomorrow and 13th is close enough to see the front.”
That puts Brad one spot behind Dale Earnhardt Jr. and two behind the championship favorite, Kevin Harvick, in the running order for Saturday night’s main event. Only three non-Chase drivers—Greg Biffle, Jimmie Johnson and Aric Almirola—will start head of Brad. And only two Contender Round qualifiers—Martin Truex Jr. in P15 and Jeff Gordon in P22—will start behind him.
Rough starting position hasn’t held Brad back at Charlotte before. In 2013, he started in P23 and won. And in 2012, he started P24 and took the checkered flag in fifth.
His final two practice sessions will come at 3:30 and 6:30 p.m. ET on Friday. He’ll also be busy on Friday piloting Team Penske’s No. 22 Discount Tire Ford Fusion in the XFINITY Series. He’s running his first NSCS/NXS double in two months.
His last double came at Watkins Glen, where he finished second in NXS and seventh in Cup. He has notched an average finish of 4.2 in his last five Cup races where he also ran in the XFINITY Series. The NXS’s Race for the Cure 300 will go green shortly after 8 p.m. Friday night.
The primary focus for Brad, however, is starting the NSCS Contender Round off on the right foot. All 12 remaining drivers are tied with 3,000 points, and only eight drivers will move on from this set of three races.
Last year in this race, race Kes started in 17th and finished 16th in the Detroit Genuine Parts Ford. However, this race was the start of a dramatic Chase with Brad at the center. After the race, Denny Hamlin pursued BK in the garage and had to be restrained by his crew. Meanwhile, Matt Kenseth ambushed Brad between haulers, sparking a brief brawl between the two crews.
This spring’s race at Charlotte passed without incident. BK was dominating the All-Star Race before being flagged for speeding on pit road, which relegated him to a ninth-place finish. He was also solid in the Coca-Cola 600, where he started sixth and finished seventh.
That was one of four Top 10 finishes for Brad over his Cup career at Charlotte. Of course, his best finish at the 1.5-mile quad oval came in 2013. In a trying season, BK came to this very event without a win, and he captured his first ever NSCS victory at Charlotte. It was one of the most memorable wins of his career, and it came as a consolation prize for an otherwise frustrating campaign.
He’ll enter this race with that feather in his cap, along with some strong results at tracks similar to CMS. As Brad has long contended, the 1.5-mile, intermediate tracks are vital to winning the championship, and the 1.5-mile paved surface with 24-degree banking at Charlotte is one of the keys to victory.
Brad has been the model of consistency at the mile-and-a-halfs this year. At Charlotte and the tracks similar to it—Atlanta, Chicago, Kansas, Kentucky, Las Vegas, and Texas—he boasts an average finish of seventh. He has finished in the Top 10 in all seven 1.5-mile races this year, including an eight-place result at Chicagoland Speedway to start the Chase.
“I’m really optimistic about it,” Brad said. “I felt like the last few tracks of a similar nature we’ve run really, really competitively at – it’s not a guarantee that we’re gonna run well this time, but I feel like we’ve got a strong shot at it in the Detroit Genuine Parts Ford.”
After two practice sessions and the NXS race on Friday, Brad will put his black and blue No. 2 to work at Charlotte. The Bank of America 500 is set to go green shortly after 7 p.m. ET on Saturday night. The race will be broadcast on NBC.
