Ryan Blaney Leads Dominant Team Penske in Atlanta Qualifying Session
Team Penske without a doubt had the best cars in the field in last weekend's NASCAR Cup Series Daytona 500, and yet the organization left Daytona Beach without a Harley J. Earl trophy. In an attempt to avenge last week's disappointment, Team Penske fired off impressively in Saturday afternoon's qualifying session ahead of Sunday's Ambetter Health 400 at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Ryan Blaney was the fastest of them all, but it wasn't by much. The driver of the No. 12 Team Penske Ford Mustang Dark Horse turned a lap around the 1.54-mile intermediate-superspeedway hybrid race track in 30.908 seconds (179.371 mph).
The 31-year-old racer credited his team for the stout qualifying effort on Saturday.
"It's a big testament to our whole group," Blaney explained in his post-qualifying press conference. "Team Penske and the Wood Brothers being the top-four, so, it's a great job by them. Hey, my job is pretty easy today. Just make sure I don't hit the chip or overshift, and the rest of it is just raw speed that the teams build into them."
This marks the 11th pole position in the 344-race NASCAR Cup Series career of Blaney, the 2023 series champion.
Blaney's lap in the final round of Saturday's qualifying session was able to slot him into the pole position by a margin of just 0.002 seconds over his teammate Austin Cindric, who will start from the outside of the front row in Sunday's race (Full Starting Lineup Here)
Josh Berry was the first non-Penske car in the qualifying order, as he took home the third starting spot for Sunday's race, but Berry's No. 21 Wood Brothers Racing team does have an alliance with Team Penske.
Rounding out a clean-sweep of the top-four spots in qualifying for Team Penske-aligned entries was Joey Logano, who will roll from the starting grid on Sunday in the fourth position.
While all four Penske-aligned cars will start from the front two rows in Sunday's race, Blaney knows it will be a dog-fight all race long to try to stay up front, or work back to the front after being shuffled from the front by others.
"Things are going to change through the race," Blaney explained. "But hopefully, that's kind of nice that at least the start of the race, hopefully, the first Stage you can control, but it's not going to be that way the whole race, right? It's just that you're going to get shuffled at some point, I'm sure pit strategy is going to come into play. So, it's just how do you react to that?"
In all, Ford Performance secured nine of the top-10 starting spots for the second NASCAR Cup Series race of the 2025 season. The lone non-Ford that secured a place in the mix in the second round of Saturday's qualifying session was Kyle Busch, the driver of the No. 8 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet.
Busch will start the race from the sixth-position, one spot behind Front Row Motorsports' Todd Gilliland, who pilots the team's No. 34 Ford Mustang Dark Horse.
Zane Smith, Chris Buescher, Brad Keselowski, and Noah Gragson rounded out the top-10 qualifiers at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
While the Ford teams looked quite stout on Saturday, the four Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota Camry XSEs were uncharacteristically slow in the session.
Chase Briscoe, who is looking to rebound from an L2-Level penalty following last weekend's Daytona 500, was the top-qualifying JGR driver in qualifying, and he'll start from beyond mid-pack in the 25th position.
Christopher Bell (32nd), Ty Gibbs (37th), and Denny Hamlin (38th) all turned in lap times near the bottom of the scoring sheet in the session and will have to carefully slice their way through the pack in Sunday's Ambetter Health 400 at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
Recommended Articles
manual
Toby Christie is the Editor-in-Chief of Racing America. He has 15 years of experience as a motorsports journalist and has been with Racing America since 2023.