McDowell Rockets to Pole Over Briscoe; YellaWood 500 Lineup

The career qualifying resurgence continued for Michael McDowell Saturday at Talladega Superspeedway as the driver of the No. 71 Spire Motorsports Chevrolet captured his second pole position of the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series season, and his eighth pole over the last two seasons.

In March, McDowell scored the first-ever pole position for Spire Motorsports in an event at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

Prior to the 2024 season, McDowell had never notched a single pole-winning run in NASCAR Cup Series competition. He's certainly made up for it.

After capturing the pole, McDowell downplayed his role in the pole as superspeedways are typically all about the car in qualifying.

"You know Talladega is, for qualifying, there's not a whole lot the driver does but try not to make any mistakes," McDowell explained. "More than anything, I talked about it before I went out there, Daytona got rained out for qualifying and we were looking forward to seeing where our car was at and if we had made any gains from the first two superspeedway races. And so, we didn't really know where we were at today, because we didn't have that baseline from Daytona, but really proud of the effort of everybody at Spire Motorsports."

McDowell captured his latest pole position with a 52.481-second (182.466 mph) lap time in the final round of the qualifying session for Sunday's YellaWood 500. McDowell bested Chase Briscoe, who has been the strongest qualifier in the NASCAR Cup Series garage this season, by a thin margin of 0.019 seconds.

"The pole is awesome, but more importantly just knowing you have a fast car going into the race tomorrow," McDowell said.

While Briscoe narrowly missed out on his eighth pole of the season, the driver did record the best qualifying effort of any of the eight Playoff contenders in the 40-car field. Only three Playoff contenders qualified inside the top-10 for Sunday's race.

Kyle Busch, who scored an eighth-place finish last weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway and is looking to snap a 90-race winless skid, the longest of his career, will start from the third position on Sunday.

Joining Busch in Row 2 will be Austin Cindric, who captured a victory in the spring event at Talladega earlier this year.

Ryan Preece, who was disqualified from a second-place finish at Talladega in the spring, will roll from the starting grid in the fifth position in the YellaWood 500 as he'll attempt to score his first career NASCAR Cup Series win.

Josh Berry, Christopher Bell (Playoff contender), Ryan Blaney (Playoff contender), Riley Herbst, and Bubba Wallace rounded out the top-10 qualifiers for Sunday's race at the 2.66-mile superspeedway in Alabama.

The NASCAR Cup Series Playoff contenders will be scattered throughout the field at the start of Sunday's race, which will serve as the second race of the Playoffs Round of 8.

As far as the Playoff drivers, who will start outside the top-10, William Byron will start 13th, Joey Logano 16th, Denny Hamlin (already locked into Championship 4 with Las Vegas win) in 17th, Kyle Larson in 19th, and Chase Elliott in 25th.

Official Starting Lineup for the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series YellaWood 500 at Talladega Superspeedway (Race 34 of 36):

(P) indicates NASCAR Cup Series Playoff driver
* indicates "Open" entry
# indicates Rookie of the Year contender
(i) indicates a driver ineligble to score points