NASCAR announces changes to superspeedway qualifying
NASCAR has made changes to group qualifying at Daytona and Talladega a reality.
Group qualifying was instituted at the beginning of the 2014 season, though 2014 Daytona 500 pole qualifying was unchanged a year ago from traditional single-car runs.
Now, qualifying will consist of single car runs, though there will likely be multiple cars on the track at once. NASCAR said Monday that for the races at Talladega in May and Daytona in July, cars will be released one-by-one at a prescribed interval from pit road. Each car will get one timed lap to post a speed. The top 12 cars from the first round of qualifying will advance to a second round and race for the pole.
After the disaster that was pole qualifying at Daytona in February for the 500, NASCAR said it was open to changes and listening to feedback from drivers, many of whom voiced their strong displeasure for the format that required cars to draft with each other (like in race conditions) to get the fastest lap possible. While NASCAR has made multiple tweaks to group qualifying at restrictor plates in the format’s short existence, this is the biggest change.
In the new format, cars will be divided into two groups for the first round of qualifying. Cars will be impounded after qualifying – teams can’t make changes to their cars without risk of losing their qualified spot – and a random draw will determine the order of cars in the first round.
The new system is similar to the format used previously for the Camping World Truck Series at Pocono and Talladega, where multiple trucks would qualify at the same time. However, the trucks were spaced out far enough from each other to prevent drafting.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
