Reutimann wins pole in Dover

David Reutimann

Jim Garrahan/AR1.com

David Reutimann stayed hot after his win Monday in the Coca-Cola 600 by winning the pole for Sunday's Autism Speaks 400 at Dover Int'l Speedway.

Reutimann put his Michael Waltrip Racing Toyota on the pole for Sunday's 13th race of the Sprint Cup Series season with a lap of 156.795 mph.

After winning his first career Sprint Cup race last weekend at Charlotte, Reutimann says there's a little more attention on the No. 00 team this week as the series races at the "Monster Mile."

"We definitely have had a little more attention for this week but in the end, there’s always an extreme amount of pressure to perform anyway, and there has been that pressure ever since I’ve been in the Cup series, and I don’t think that’ll ever change," Reutimann said. “So I don’t know that it puts any more pressure on me because the pressure’s already there, and it’s pretty intense as it is. But I don’t think it’s any different. I’m not approaching things any differently."

“I’m not really looking at things any differently," he said. "We still need to do the same things; we still need to run well week in, week out. We need to perform; there’s always the pressure for that. And we need to get ourselves back up in contention to be in the Chase, and that’s our priority right now."

Kasey Kahne, Juan Montoya, Reed Sorenson and Greg Biffle rounded out the top-5.

Q&A with Polesitter

How was your qualifying lap?
"It seemed to be pretty good. We unloaded and felt like the car was pretty good and made some small adjustments to it as the course of practice went on and in the end I was actually a little concerned about it if it was going to be fast enough because the car got pretty tight compared to what we had in our practice run. We lost a little bit of time from what we did in practice, but the Aaron's Dream Machine was good. Rodney Childers (crew chief) made the right adjustments. We were just a little bit tight. That TRD horsepower got us to the corners there and got us to the other end. So it was a good enough lap and I wasn't really sure it was going to hold up but I'm thankful that it did."

Does your win help boost your confidence coming in here to Dover?
"I'm kind of a nervous person anyway. Waiting around for them to decide if we won the race or not and then waiting around all day so everybody had a shot at us to try to knock us off the pole kind of becomes nerve wracking over time. In the end, we had a good car. The way things went down last weekend — we won the race and I'm really proud of that and it feels really good. I think it gives the shop a little momentum because those guys work so hard on everything. For me, I would like to win a race a little differently than that, but you take them anyway you can get them. I'm none the less proud of the call Rodney (Childers) made last week that won us the race. So I do think we have a little momentum going right now and a really good race team. So those things help my cause greatly every week when I get in the car."

Did the track change during the afternoon?
"I worried a little bit about the earlier draw. It seems to be your mindset because most of the race tracks that you go to when you go out and it's hotter the track is obviously slower. It just seems like the concrete surfaces like we have here in Dover don't seem to react as drastically to temperature change as a lot of the places that we go to. When we went out the temperature was about the same. I think about three degrees hotter than when we were at practice so it wasn't a great deal different. I felt pretty good that the car was going to be pretty decent and it was — just a little bit on the tight side, but at the end of the day I don't think going out early was a factor. I don't know if any cloud cover would've come that it would've helped anybody that much just because the track surface doesn't seem to react that much."

How good is your race car?
"It's really good. Rodney Childers (crew chief) and the guys brought me another great Aaron's Dream Machine. We just had it a little bit too tight for qualifying but off the trailer it's been really, really good and I think we've got a pretty good race car so hopefully our time will hold pretty strong and give us a good pit selection for Sunday. We'll work on this thing tomorrow in race trim."

Results

+ Set by Owner Points
* Denotes Rookie