Catchfence

After fighting a loose race car in practice during the heat of the day, Crew Chief David Hyder and the #21 Wood Brothers’ team made “spot-on” changes to the car for the cooler evening temperatures and Bill qualified the #21 Motorcraft Ford Fusion 10th.

Not since the 2002 race have the Wood Brothers qualified in the top ten at Lowe’s Motor Speedway when Elliott Sadler sat on the outside pole. For Bill, it is his first top ten starting position at Lowe’s since doing so in 2003.

Bill added, “I’m so glad we came here and ran last week. We weren’t planning on doing it and I sat down and talked to Len, Eddie and Hyder at Texas and I said, ‘Look guys, if there’s anyway, we need to try to run the All-Star weekend. We can learn so much,’ and we came over here and made some changes and that was good. We came with kind of a whole different deal than we had last week and it really paid off. I’ve been out of the car for awhile and you need to do this stuff every week and it just makes you better, and what we changed from last week to tonight really helped a lot.”

The #21 Motorcraft Ford Fusion was the fastest qualifying Ford with a lap time of 28.851 seconds and an average lap speed of 187.169 mph. Ryan Newman earned the pole with a lap time of 28.651 seconds.

The teams will have Friday off with two practices set for Saturday before Sunday’s 600 mile race.

- Wood Brothers Racing, Press Release