Denny Hamlin claimed his first pole of the season in qualifying for Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Atlanta Motor Speedway .
Newman, Busch, Edwards and Stewart complete top-five
Denny Hamlin claimed his first pole position of the season in qualifying for Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup race.
Hamlin edged out Ryan Newman to claim top spot at Atlanta Motor Speedway with Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards and Tony Stewart completing the top five.
It was the eighth pole of Hamlin's career and the 29-year-old said afterwards: "I'm a very bad qualifier so I'll take it!"
Hamlin already has five wins to his name this season, but the Joe Gibbs Racing driver has endured a lean spell recently and was delighted to be back on the pace.
"I feel like the last ten races have definitely been up and down for our team," he continued.
"We were on such a hot streak there. We kind of got spoiled. The regular season was kind of irrelevant at that point because we knew we were going to get in the Chase.
"We're going to treat these next two weeks as if we're Chase racing. We found ourselves going for wins so much, going all-out for wins, that it probably hurt us in the long run. These next two weeks, we're going back to points racing."
