NASCAR Cup NHMS: Hocevar leads brief practice; Sunday start time changed

NASCAR scrapped Cup qualifying early on Saturday when rain moved into the area but when a small break came worked feverishly to dry the track in hopes of getting teams some practice time.

As it turned out, teams got on track for just over 4½ minutes before the rain returned and remainder of the 30-minute session was canceled.

In that brief time, Carson Hocevar ended up with the fastest average lap speed at 127.533 mph and completed seven laps, the most anyone was able to finish.

Michael McDowell ended up second quick (127.312 mph) while Brad Keselowski was third (127.214 mph).

William Byron and rookie Zane Smith rounded out the top five.

Shortly after practice was canceled, NASCAR announced it had moved up the start of Sunday’s Cup race about 30 minutes to 2:06 p.m. ET due to expected inclement weather.

The lineup for Sunday’s Cup race was set by the NASCAR performance metric, which has Hendrick driver Chase Elliott on the pole.

Keselowski, who will start in the top 10 on Sunday based on the metric, said the dynamic of this weekend’s race by greatly altered by the weather and NASCAR’s willingness to use wet weather tires.

“We’d rather start on the pole, right, have a shot at that and see us have practice and qualifying,” he said. “But you know it certainly does look like there’s going to be some significant weather adversity throughout the weekend and probably a strong chance that we end up racing on the rain tires at some point.

“That’s going to completely shuffle the grid and make qualifying and all that stuff a little less relevant.”

Keselowski said NASCAR has a difficult challenge to find the “right condition” to utilize the tires.

“If it’s raining too hard and there’s too much water coming down, the visibility goes to zero. We can’t see in the cars, but probably just as important, the TV cameras and the fans can’t see,” he said.

“But if it stops raining and it’s not raining enough, it melts the tires right off the car, very quickly. So, you need like a constant, very low drizzle of rain to be able to make it feasible for the cars to run in the wet.

“They need the perfect weather to do it.”