Ryan Blaney put the No. 12 Team Penske Ford on the pole for Saturday night’s Cook Out 400, running 121.485 mph around Richmond Raceway’s 0.75-mile oval and grabbing the top spot in the closing minutes of Friday’s qualifying session. It’s Blaney’s fourth pole of the season and the 16th of his Cup Series career, and normally that’s the whole story. At Richmond, pole day is just the appetizer.
Blaney, the 2023 series champion, wasn’t shy about how hard that lap was to find. “I wouldn’t kind of specify myself as a very good qualifier,” he said afterward, crediting crew chief Jonathan Hassler for reworking how the team approaches one-lap runs. The challenge he described is specific to Richmond’s format: teams spend practice building race-run pace, then have to find several seconds a lap more for a single, cold qualifying attempt on a three-quarter-mile track where the wall is close and the margin for error is razor-thin. Blaney’s fix wasn’t a setup change; it was applying the same aggression he’d use at the end of a fuel run to a lap with no tires warmed up and no rhythm built.
Joe Gibbs Racing’s Chase Briscoe missed the pole by just 0.050 seconds, good for his 13th top-10 start of the season and the outside of the front row in the No. 19 Toyota. Josh Berry ran third in the Wood Brothers’ No. 21 Ford, Ty Gibbs, fresh off winning at Iowa Speedway last week, qualified fourth in the No. 54 Toyota, and William Byron rounded out the top five in Hendrick Motorsports’ No. 24 Chevrolet. Three manufacturers, five playoff-relevant teams, and not a full second separating any of them.
The name missing from that conversation is the one currently leading the championship. Denny Hamlin, a five-time winner at this track, qualified 14th, a reminder that qualifying speed and points-standings strength don’t always move together. With only three races left before NASCAR locks in its 16-driver playoff field, starting position at Richmond matters less for trophy hunting and more for avoiding the kind of mid-pack contact that turns a routine short-track night into a bent fender and a lost points weekend. Hamlin doesn’t need to win here to protect his spot atop the standings, but any driver near the cutline can’t afford a single bad restart on a track where side-by-side racing gets tight in a hurry.
Further back, Austin Dillon qualified 16th in the No. 3 Chevrolet while chasing something no other active driver is within reach of: a third consecutive Richmond win. Only Richard Petty, Bobby Allison and David Pearson have ever swept three straight races at this track. Dillon’s own Friday practice didn’t inspire much confidence in a fourth name joining that list. “We’ve got to get our car better,” he said, adding that the team would keep digging before raceday. Richmond’s abrasive, low-banked surface rewards teams that can carry forward setup notes from a previous winning run, which is exactly why three-peats are so rare, and why Dillon’s team is searching for answers rather than coasting on last year’s notebook.
Friday’s other headline had nothing to do with lap times. Christopher Bell’s No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota and Cody Ware’s No. 51 Rick Ware Racing Chevrolet both failed pre-race technical inspection twice, and NASCAR ejected both cars’ chiefs for the remainder of the weekend while stripping the teams of their pit-stall selection. Losing pit-stall choice matters more at a three-quarter-mile track than it does at a mile-and-a-half speedway; short-track pit road is tight, and a bad stall assignment can cost several positions on every single stop, all night long. That’s a particularly inconvenient problem for Bell. He came into Richmond sixth in points after a runner-up finish at Iowa Speedway, but he’s also tied Harry Gant’s 1981 record of seven second-place finishes in a season without a win. Bell has finished sixth or better in seven of his ten career Richmond starts, so the speed to contend is obviously there. What he can’t afford is handing back positions on pit road because of a problem his own team created.
Qualifying pace and practice pace told two different stories. Daniel Suarez topped Friday’s practice session at 117.961 mph in his Spire Motorsports Chevrolet, with Erik Jones, Austin Cindric, Riley Herbst and Alex Bowman rounding out the top five. Cindric posted the best 10- and 20-lap averages, Kyle Larson turned in the strongest 15-lap number, and Blaney himself paced the 25- and 30-lap runs, the longer stints that actually predict how a car behaves deep into a green-flag run. None of those long-run standouts translated into qualifying-lap speed, which is the exact disconnect Blaney described: Richmond punishes anyone who can’t separate one-lap aggression from 400-lap patience, and Saturday night belongs to whoever manages both.
The Cook Out 400 goes green Saturday at 7 p.m. ET on USA Network, with HBO Max, MRN Radio and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio also carrying the broadcast. Blaney starts up front with a car that’s clearly capable of one-lap speed, but Richmond has a long history of humbling whoever starts first and rewarding whoever still has tires left at lap 400. With the playoff cutline tightening and two cars already down a car chief and their pit-stall pick before the green flag even drops, Friday’s pole is easily the least complicated storyline heading into Saturday night.
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