Gordon captures the Sylvania 300 pole at New Hampshire

[media-credit name=”Credit: Rainier Ehrhardt/Getty Images” align=”alignright” width=”244″][/media-credit]Jeff Gordon captured the pole for Sunday’s Sylvania 300 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway with a lap of 134.911 MPH (28.230 secs). This was Gordon’s second pole of the season.

“This car has been awesome in qualifying trim all day long. I just give a lot of credit to this Drive To End Hunger Chevrolet team. Don’t forget to text Hunger to 50555 to continue to help this great cause. What an awesome effort, great lap. It felt good. The car got off the corner really strong and I thought that it would be really close and as tight as these times are you just never know.” Gordon said.

Gordon shaved his mustache after a parts failure struck him down during the Chase-opening race at Chicagoland last Sunday. At New Hampshire, a clean-shaven Gordon hopes to get back in the championship hunt. But he has a huge up hill battle to accomplish that goal.

Kyle Busch qualified second with a lap of 134.753 MPH.

“That was a pretty good lap from where we were earlier in the day with the M&M’s Camry. Dave (Rogers, crew chief) and the guys did a really good job making some good changes to it to make it pick up speed. I felt like the car had decent balance, just needed more grip to make speed. They did a good job of that.” Busch said.

Tony Stewart qualified third.

“It seemed like it got better grip the second lap. Just took a little longer for the tires to come in.” Stewart said.

Brian Vickers qualified fourth and Carl Edwards qualified fifth.

“We had a pretty good lap with our Aflac Fusion, which is very good, and now we just go race. We’ll tune in the race car tomorrow in practice, but the track is very fast right now.” Edwards said.

Last week’s winner and the series points leader Brad Keselowski, qualified 15th.

“We’re just missing a little bit in qualifying trim and I think we’ll have it in the race.” Keselowski said.