Inspection failure decided final Xfinity Daytona starting spot

Credit: NADIA ZOMORODIAN/NEWS-JOURNAL / USA TODAY NETWORK

Making his NASCAR Xfinity Series debut, Jesse Love will lead the field to green in the season opening race at Daytona International Speedway.

The race was scheduled for Saturday evening but moved up to Saturday afternoon but likely will not run until Monday morning due to a torrential downpour over the weekend. But NASCAR was able to get qualifying in, against all odds, and the race now has a starting lineup.

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Love, a two-time champion in the ARCA West Series and reigning ARCA national series champion, placed his No. 2 Whelen Chevrolet Camaro at the top of the charts with a second-round speed of 49.702. It was three one-thousandths of a second faster than Richard Childress Racing teammate Austin Hill.

Hill, in the No. 21 Chevrolet, had won the pole for each of the last four superspeedway races prior to being overtaken by his young teammate.

Making his own full-time return to the Xfinity Series after a one-year stint at the Cup Series was third fastest ahead of Parker Kligerman and Shane Van Gisbergen for Kaulig Racing, Big Machine Racing and Kaulig respectively.

Van Gisbergen, a three-time Supercars champion in Australia, was approved to run this race after competing in the ARCA race on Friday night into Saturday early morning.

There was some drama in post qualifying inspection.

Initially, Joey Gase of Joey Gase Motorsports, Caesar Bacarella of Alpha Prime Racing, Dawson Cram of JD Motorsports, CJ McLaughlin off RSS Racing, Kyle Sieg of RSS Racing and Stanton Barrett of Mike Harmon Racing all failed to qualify.

But then David Starr of MBM Motorsports failed inspection over what is believed to be a track bar issue. Cram then made the show on points.

The team issued the following statement.

NASCAR has disqualified our P29 Xfinity Series qualifying lap at Daytona due to our track bar height. We passed pre-qualifying tech this morning with the track bar level as required by the rulebook. Somehow in the normal qualifying adjustments, we exceeded the maximum three inches of split allowed for the track bar.

This was an honest mistake. We are not making excuses, but to paint the picture for you all, our entire crew was working today on one hour of sleep after our last lap crash while running in the Top 5 of the ARCA race last night.

This Xfinity car was very fast. David Starr drove an excellent lap, and we want to thank our huge team of partners that made our Daytona attempt possible. We will be running a makeup race at Talladega for all involved: David behind the wheel of the same car, same engine program, and all of our same sponsors.

MBM has experienced extreme highs and lows during this Speedweeks. We demonstrated in the last several days what we can accomplish with the proper funding. We will be running a limited schedule for the remainder of the season, competing only when we have the funds to run at the highest level.
MBM Motorsports