The NASCAR Cup Series’ last playoff race in the Round of 12 is this Sunday (Oct. 10) and Denny Hamlin is on the pole at the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL.
The current points leader finished seventh in Monday’s rain-shortened race at Talladega Superspeedway.
Team Penske’s Brad Keselowski and Joey Logano will start second and third while Hamlin’s Joe Gibbs Racing teammates Christopher Bell and Martin Truex Jr. round out the top five.
Ryan Blaney will wheel the No. 12 Penske Ford from sixth and Stewart-Haas Racing’s Kevin Harvick is seventh. Chase Elliott is eighth, Kyle Busch begins ninth and Kyle Larson finishes up the top 10 starters.
William Byron and Alex Bowman will line up 11th and 12th as the final two playoff drivers. All drivers contending for the championship will start up front, while the remaining drivers line up behind them. Harvick, Bell, Byron and Bowman are all below the cut line heading into the Charlotte.
Bubba Wallace, who won his first career Cup race on Monday, will start 15th.
The starting order was set by an equation that combined four performance-based categories. 50% of the driver’s and car owner’s finishing position from Talladega (25% each), 15% of where the driver’s fastest lap ranked and 35% of the team owner’s points ranking were added together, and whoever had the lowest score would start first.
Cup Starting Lineup for Charlotte ROVAL
The Bank of America ROVAL 400 airs on Oct. 10 at 2 p.m. ET on NBC.
Joy joined Frontstretch in 2019 as a NASCAR DraftKings writer, expanding to news and iRacing coverage in 2020. She's currently an assistant editor and involved with photos, social media and news editing. A California native, Joy was raised watching motorsports and started watching NASCAR extensively in 2001. She earned her B.A. degree in Liberal Studies at California State University Bakersfield in 2010.