Hamlin grabs pole for Bristol race

Associated Press

BRISTOL, Tenn.

Denny Hamlin, searching for anything to save his season, got a slight boost Friday with a pole-winning run at Bristol Motor Speedway.

Hamlin turned a lap 128.969 mph around the 0.533-mile bullring to put his Toyota in the top starting spot for tonight’s race. Although it’s his fourth pole of the season, it’s his first career pole at Bristol, where Hamlin is the defending race winner.

But he heads into the race in search of anything positive: He’s 25th in points — largely because he missed four races with a fractured vertebra suffered in a crash at California — and entered Bristol stuck in a miserable nine-race slump in which he hasn’t logged a finish higher than 18th.

Although he wants to win a race, he’ll take any sort of minor victory.

“It’s by far the worst run, these nine races, in my career,” he said. “A lot of it is our own doing.

“We got off track for a couple races because we’ve blown right front tires in consecutive weeks and we started changing our setups and we couldn’t find anything that was very good with that. That burnt another three, four weeks. We’ve had horsepower cut back. But we’re headed in the right direction.

“At any moment, we can go from a 25th-place car to winning a pole and winning the race. There’s not a whole lot of teams that can say they can win at any moment, but I feel like we can.”

Hamlin’s lap was good enough to hold off five-time Bristol winner Kurt Busch, who qualified second with a lap of 128.770. It’s the seventh front-row starting spot of the season for Busch, who is suddenly a hot commodity on the free-agent market with an offer to join Stewart-Haas Racing next season.

Furniture Row Racing has made its offer to keep Busch, and the driver fired from Penske Racing at the end of 2011 now finds himself not only wading through multiple prospects but vying for a spot in the Chase for the Sprint Cup championship.