Carson Kvapil will look to re-insert himself into the conversation for this season’s NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series championship in Saturday’s National Debt Relief 250 at Martinsville Speedway, as he leads the field to green in the No. 1 Chevrolet.
Posting a quick time of 19.855 seconds (95.371) in Friday evening’s single-vehicle qualifying session from the 0.526-mile paperclip, Kvapil will lead a string of JR Motorsports-fielded Chevrolets when the race commences.
“It’s awesome,” Kvapil told The CW post-qualifying. “I said after practice that Rodney [Childers] and all of these guys made some really good changes, I didn’t think we were that amazing, maybe, to start practice, but we really turned it around in that second or third run to give us a really fast car.”
“It’s just always fun to get poles and lead the field to green and kind of being in control is going to be good and hopefully we can get out front and just knock out laps, and today we really just need stage points and race wins.”
Rajah Caruth, driver of the No. 88 HendrickCars.com Chevrolet Camaro, will start from the outside of the front row for the 250-lap contest on Saturday, with Justin Allgaier, the organization’s biggest championship threat, starting in third.
Parker Retzlaff, who recently signed a contract extension with Viking Motorsports for the 2027 NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series campaign, will roll from fourth, with non-Chase driver William Sawalich completing the top-five.
Talladega winner Sammy Smith, and the fourth of JR Motorsports’ entries for this weekend’s event, will start sixth, with championship contenders Sheldon Creed, Jesse Love, and Corey Day qualifying seventh, eighth, and ninth.
Taylor Gray, winner of last Fall’s event at Martinsville, will roll from 10th.
Other notable drivers starting outside the top-10 include Brandon Jones in 12th, Brent Crews in 13th, Sam Mayer in 14th, and Austin Hill in 21st.
All 38 drivers posted a lap time in qualifying, the slowest of which was Baltazar Leguizamon, making his oval-track debut in the No. 42 Chevrolet Camaro for Young’s Motorsports.
