RIDGEWAY, VA — Group qualifying will commence at Martinsville Speedway after a driver vote in spite of scoring issues that plagued practice leading into qualifying.
Five cars will go out together, taking five laps, and 10 people will time the drivers along with electronic timing and scoring system with the lap times being determined by the average from all 11 times recorded each lap.
“They just said that they’re having problems with multiple cars out there so they should do single car qualifying,” Travis Swaim said after a contentious emergency driver’s meeting that was called moments before qualifying. “They do it for the top three series but they don’t do it here so they’re going to do five.”
Brayton Haws, who races in the CARS Tour which utilizes single car qualifying, voted for single car runs.
“I think it would take too much time to do one car and five laps is better than three laps,” Haws remarked. “If you make a mistake, you have two more laps to pick it up.”
Kaz Grala and Spencer Davis were both torn.
“I’m torn because, with single car runs, the way they’re doing it with the stopwatches, it’d be more accurate because they’re only watching one car,” Grala explained. “However, we mocked up in practice to do five laps so I really didn’t want to mess with that. We got tuned for that.”
“I wanted to do single cars but I voted for more than one,” Davis remarked. “There’s some cars that don’t belong here. They don’t even belong at Bowman Gray Stadium. They’re four seconds off so you’re obviously going to catch them with the multi-car five lap runs.”
