Denny Hamlin claims Pocono pole in wild qualifying session

Denny Hamlin claimed pole for the NASCAR Cup Series race at Pocono Raceway on Saturday but a lot happened along the way to get to that point.

It was a very eventful session at The Tricky Triangle.

Todd Gilliland and AJ Allmendinger were very slow and will start 31st and 32nd respectively. The actually both qualified worse than that both move up one spot because William Byron crashed and will have to go to a backup car.

The No. 24 spins! @WilliamByron loses control exiting the tunnel turn! #BuschLightPole pic.twitter.com/QRZrC2Af2h

— NASCAR (@NASCAR) June 21, 2025

Byron was fastest in practice earlier in the day and will not be able to race that car. Meanwhile, Bubba Wallace didn’t even turn a lap because something broke in the rear end housing.

Mechanical issues on the No. 23! @BubbaWallace's car will not start on pit road! #BuschLightPole pic.twitter.com/MEdby6OUth

— NASCAR (@NASCAR) June 21, 2025

Josh Berry broke something in the underbody during practice and Brennan Poole was not allowed to take a qualifying lap due to multiple sessions.

Read more: Hamlin refreshed after missing race for the birth of his son 

As for Hamlin, the week off did nothing to take away his momentum after winning at Michigan in his most recent start.

“Truthfully, I’m on a run,” Hamlin said. “I don’t know how else to say it. Everything is going really well right now. You know inevitably it’s not going to keep going forever, but right now it is.”

Hamlin wasn’t confident about how they unloaded.

“If you would have asked me an hour ago, I probably wasn’t going to be very confident,” Hamlin said. “I thought with how off the balance was in practice I just wanted to get a top-10 qualifying effort. If I can do that and make some adjustments overnight, then I’m back in the game. If I had a poor qualifying effort, that was just going to make the balance worse and that’s just going to be how it was going to be no matter how good your car is. I thought the task to get another win was going to need to be starting in the top-15. But now that we are first, we need to make sure we execute well and max that balance in race trim and we should be fine.”

How was the race pace in practice?

“Not great, truthfully,” Hamlin said. “I was very surprised about the big balance change. I ran as fast as I could in practice and I think we were 26^th or something like that. What was encouraging was we ran our fastest lap on Lap 16, so we had some capability to it. We knew we could make it better in the short run, you can’t run your fastest lap on Lap 16. There was improvement to be had and told them what I needed and I obviously I know how to drive around the track and they gave me exactly what I asked for.”

Starting lineup