Unseasonably warm temperatures in the high-80s and brilliant sunshine set a scorching stage at Homestead-Miami Speedway for Friday's Busch Light Pole Qualifying session. Amidst the sweltering South Florida heat, Joe Gibbs Racing's Chase Briscoe kept his head to snatch the top starting spot for Sunday's NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race.
Driving the No. 19 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, the 31-year-old Indiana native threw down a lap of 166.687 mph to secure his second pole of the season and his second in just the last three weeks following Talladega. It marks the 11th career pole of his career, though he only edged teammate Denny Hamlin by a razor-thin margin of .017 seconds. "I feel confident we can contend, but I wouldn’t say I was the dominant car," Briscoe admitted after securing the pole, though he feels good about his chances to execute in the mix on race day.
and wanted to see if I could find something down there, and I found something, just wasn’t what I was looking for.
That front-row lockout is massive for Joe Gibbs Racing, but Hamlin's start in the No. 11 JGR Toyota carries extra weight as the highest-qualifying of the three drivers still mathematically eligible for the championship. Meanwhile, the championship leader, Hendrick Motorsports' Kyle Larson, will launch his No. 5 Chevrolet from fourth on the 40-car grid. The final title contender, JGR's Christopher Bell, slotted his No. 20 JGR Toyota into sixth quickest.
Larson arrives at the season finale holding a commanding 67-point advantage over Bell and a 70-point cushion on Hamlin, a three-time Homestead winner. Both JGR drivers have been open about the long odds of wrestling the trophy away from Larson, who is hunting for his third series title and a shot at history as the first driver to win consecutive championships since Jimmie Johnson's legendary streak from 2006 to 2010. Larson won the series' last visit to the 1.5-miler in March of 2025, and while he felt his Chevrolet had more speed than he managed on his qualifying run, the 33-year-old Californian is more than content with a front-two-rows starting spot.
"We qualified well and it’s a long race," Larson said, keeping a lighthearted mindset over the weekend while revealing his crew spent Saturday debating whether a hot dog is a sandwich and if cereal counts as soup. Behind the leaders, 23XI Racing's Tyler Reddick went third quickest to complete a dominant top-three sweep for Toyota at the front of the Homestead grid—marking the third time in the last four races at the track that the manufacturer has locked out the top three.
The rest of the top 10 starting order fills out with Team Penske's Austin Cindric right behind Larson, followed by Bell, Hendrick teammates Chase Elliott and last week's Martinsville Speedway winner William Byron, Penske's Ryan Blaney, and Spire Motorsports' Daniel Suárez.
Not everyone had a clean run through qualifying, however. The 2012 series champion Brad Keselowski suffered a heavy hit when he clipped the wall exiting Turn 4, sending his No. 6 Roush Fenway Keselowski Ford Mustang spinning down into the inside wall. Thankfully he was uninjured, but the incident leaves him to start the final full-time race of his career from last place on the 40-car grid. "I was trying to run the bottom lane in (turns) three and four because the track was so slick," Keselowski explained, "and wanted to see if I could find something down there, and I found something, just wasn’t what I was looking for."
Though Hamlin missed out on Saturday's pole by a hair, there was still a consolation: he was officially honored for scoring a series-best six poles this season, the largest single-season haul of his career.
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