David Gilliland wins Coke-Zero 400 pole

David Gilliland

David Gilliland won the Coors Light Pole Award in a frenetic, rain-abbreviated Friday afternoon qualifying session full of gamesmanship for the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series at Daytona International Speedway.

After all the aerodynamic ploys and team efforts, Gilliland was at the top of the leaderboard with a fast lap of 199.322 mph in the Front Row Motorsports No. 38 Ford. It was his third Sprint Cup pole of his career, his first since he started first in the 2007 Daytona 500 and the first for the underdog team owned by Bob Jenkins.

"Restrictor-plate tracks are a strong suit for our team," Gilliland said of Daytona and sister track Talladega, where he posted his first pole position in his Sprint Cup career. "I hope everybody enjoyed watching it on TV. It was crazy."

Gilliland will start first again in Saturday night's Coke Zero 400 (7:30 p.m. ET, TNT), the series' 18th of 36 points-paying races this season.

Reed Sorenson qualified second at 199.221 mph in the Tommy Baldwin Racing No. 36 Chevrolet. Landon Cassill, Bobby Labonte and defending Sprint Cup champion Jimmie Johnson completed a unique top five before rain halted qualifying after just one of the three rounds.

The session marked the debut of multi-car, knockout-style qualifying for the Sprint Cup Series at Daytona. NASCAR introduced the format before the 2014 season, but opted to keep tradition intact for the season-opening Daytona 500 with a combination of single-car time trials and twin qualifying races.

The importance of the aerodynamic draft at the 2.5-mile superspeedway prompted some unusual strategies even as the track opened for qualifying. Drivers wound up virtually crawling around the track at a drastically reduced pace at times in the lone 25-minute session, playing a cat-and-mouse game of trying to line up with teammates and allies while preventing rival teams from gaining an aero advantage.

"What a mess this is," said Brian Vickers, who missed on making the first 24-driver cut. "I mean, what do you do? … I can't believe someone hasn't wrecked, to be honest with you."

The unusual strategy plays made for some unusual names atop the leaderboard after the first of three scheduled sessions, with Gilliland, Sorenson, Cassill and Labonte forming a fast nose-to-tail quartet to sweep the top four spots. It also created dicey conditions with cars running at widely varying speeds on the track's multiple lanes, including one instance where a Kyle Larson-led pack nearly stopped at the pit road entrance.

"That was pretty dumb …," said Joey Logano, who failed to make the final 12-driver cut for only the second time this season. He'll start 28th in his second-worst starting berth of 2014. "Before you know it you're stopped on the race track and what do you do. It is what it is."

Daytona 500 winner Dale Earnhardt Jr. will start seventh in a bid to sweep the season's two races at Daytona. He'll line up right ahead of ninth-fastest Jeff Gordon, his Hendrick Motorsports teammate and the current Sprint Cup Series points leader.
Joe Nemechek was the only driver who failed to qualify for the 43-car field.