Carl Edwards Wins Second Straight Bristol Pole

Carl Edwards won his fifth pole of the season

Jeff Curry/NASCAR via Getty Images

Carl Edwards spoiled the day for teammate Denny Hamlin but carried the day for Joe Gibbs Racing, winning the pole for Saturday night's Bass Pro Shops NRA Night Race at Bristol Motor Speedway.

Edwards topped the third and final round of Friday's qualifying session with a lap of 14.602 seconds (131.407 mph) to knock teammate Matt Kenseth from the top spot. Kyle Busch then took over the second spot, putting JGR in position to sweep the top three spots before Ryan Blaney cracked the top three to break up the trifecta.

Hamlin, who topped his own track qualifying record in the opening round, hit the track in the final minutes and rocketed to the second spot, but couldn't top Edwards. Hamlin's time of 14.625 seconds (131.200mph) was enough to knock Blaney out of the top three to preserve the sweep for JGR, with Kyle Busch (14.655, 130.931mph) holding third. Blaney (14.688, 130.637mph) slipped to fourth, while Kenseth (14.690, 130.619mph) rounded out the top five.

Edwards' pole was his fifth of the season and 21^st of his career, and gives him two straight at Bristol, after he taking the pole and the win in the race held here back in April.

[adinserter name="GOOGLE AD"]"A little bit surprising – we didn't make a mock (qualifying) run," said Edwards. "That tells you how great of teammates I have. They're so fast and they helped us a lot, so we'll start where we started earlier this year. Hopefully we can put STANLEY in victory lane, but this is going to be a heck of a race. Those are fast laps. That's a lot of fun. Just proud of my guys – they worked really hard. We rolled the dice and it was fast.

"All these JGR (Joe Gibbs Racing) Toyotas are great. We've been working well together, pushing each other and, like I said, I owe it to my teammates. This is – with no qualifying runs in practice, this is pretty cool."

Hamlin led both of the opening rounds of Friday's qualifying session, taking the top spot in the opening round with a lap of 14.573 seconds (131.668 mph), breaking his own track speed record of 131.407 set just last year. Kyle Busch took the second spot, followed by Joey Logano, Kenseth and Blaney.

In the second round, Hamlin rocketed back to the top of the leaderboard again, clocking in at 14.704 seconds (130.495). Kenseth, Martin Truex, Jr., Blaney and Edwards rounded out the top five in the round.

With the third and final round underway, Hamlin waited until the final two minutes to try and sweep all three rounds, but came up .023 seconds short.

Although he gets to keep his name in the track record books, Hamlin would rather have won his first pole of the season.

"It's a small consolation," said Hamlin of keeping the track record. "It would still be cool to get a pole; we haven't got a pole this year, and we want to get that done. I definitely was mindful of the track record, because we had it before so I wanted make sure we kept it.

"I can't believe we've qualified as good as we have this year and to not have gotten a pole has been unbelievable, but still a great effort by our whole team and hopefully we have a good race up here tomorrow night and we get in victory lane."

Chase Elliott, Truex, Jr., A.J. Allmendinger, Brad Keselowski and Logano made up the rest of the top ten qualifiers.

Qualifying Results

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