Timothy Peters walks away with the pole from today’s historic disarray of timing and scoring which caused a massive delay in receiving the qualifying results. Jake Crum will start on his outside.

“This is just so cool. This is what I live for, and we’ve been able to do that hat dance and win it, but we’ve never been able to sit on the pole, so today is definitely refreshing to be able to add this to the bucket list.”

After practice concluded, the drivers were called to a driver’s meeting where the timing and scoring problems were announced, which led to a discussion and a vote on how the qualifying format would go: european style or single-car runs.

Peters and Crum both voted for single car runs, but lost in the majority vote.

“I voted for single car qualifying. Obviously the group deal worked out for me. I think, possibly, it would have been a little bit more efficient going the single car deal, but either way, obviously, this was a pretty efficient system,” Peters explains.

Crum explained that he preferred single-file because he felt it depended more on the driver than “having a rabbit to chase.”

“I think they made the best call they could at the time. But as I said, I voted to do the single car, but the majority of the crowd picked to have the five car, five lap deal, so it worked out and I’m happy,” said Crum.

Many advantages come into play with starting on the front row. The top two don’t have to go through a single heat race which saves them from wearing up their tires.

“You don’t really have to put the laps on your tires,” Peters, the pole-sitter said. “The format is different this year to where you run the heat race, if you don’t make it in on the heat race, you go in on a last chance, then if you make it in on the last chance, you can’t change tires until lap 150. So there are definitely a lot of advantages of only having two laps or five laps on your tires versus 50 laps. So it is definitely for sure the best place to start.”

Brayton Haws qualified third, Lee Pulliam fourth and Brandon Butler fifth.  The rest of the qualifying rundown is still being sorted out.