Last month, Brennan Poole made his first start at Salem Speedway and won. This weekend for his second start at Pocono, he is on the same route as he led practice and won the Menards Pole Award presented by Ansell for the Pocono ARCA 200.
“It’s a lot of fun,” the Woodlands, Texas native said. “This is the biggest track I’ve ever been to, ever made laps on. It’s really exciting; this is really fast. The car’s been great all weekend. Billy Venturini’s given me a great race car. I’m looking forward to tomorrow. We’re just going to have to take it one lap at a time. We’ve got 80 laps, so we’ll see how it pans out.”
The 20-year old qualified his No. 25 Lacy Green/Scott Dobrin RE/MAX Toyota with a lap of 53.807 seconds (167.264 mph), beating Ty Dillon by 0.526 seconds for his first career pole. Poole’s lap marks a new track record since July 2003 with Kyle Busch set it at 170.849mph.
This marks the second pole in a row for Venturini Motorsports as they won the pole last weekend with Josh Richards at Chicagoland. This also marks their second in a row for Pocono Raceway as they won the pole last June with Mikey Kile.
This car is a brand new for the team as it was only completed Wednesday at 4:30a.m., less than 55 hours before the first practice. Poole led that opening practice with a best lap of 53.989 seconds, nearly one-half second ahead of Frank Kimmel. Poole credits all the practice that he did on the video games.
“I’ve watched a ton of video over the last week and I’ve been playing a lot of Xbox,” he said. “I probably ran about 500 laps before I even got here, on the computer. I started doing everything I possibly could before I got here as a driver. It helps out when you have great guys who can give you great cars. It makes your job a lot easier.”
Kimmel, meanwhile, qualified third, followed by Chris Buescher and Grant Enfinger.
“I’m pretty happy with our Ansell/Menards Ford,” Kimmel said after practice earlier in the day. “We’re a little tight in the corners in race trim and we continued to make adjustments to free it up. On that last qualifying run I think (crew chief) Bill (Kimmel) freed me up too much. I think we’ll be good on old tires, though. That will set up nicely for long green flag runs.”
Venturini Motorsports’ Hal Martin qualified sixth, followed by Tim George Jr., Chad Hackenbracht, Bobby Gerhart and Sean Corr.
The Pocono ARCA 200 begins at 1:30 p.m. tomorrow, with live timing and scoring coverage available at ARCARacing.com. SPEED will air same-day delay television coverage of the race at 8 p.m.
