Ty Gibbs stole the pole and SVG is off it for the first time ever. But the fastest race-pace car starts third, and the fourth-fastest starts fifteenth. The grid and the race-pace board are two different lists.
Intercepted Audio “ ” Ty Gibbs stole the pole on a late gamble and Shane van Gisbergen is off it for the first time ever. But the car with the fastest race pace starts third — and the fourth-fastest starts fifteenth. The grid and the race-pace board are two different lists.
We built both. Sonoma Raceway · Toyota/Save Mart 350 · June 2026 · By PitByNumbers Staff · 8 min read Re-sort practice by race pace and the picture flips. Larson, who starts third , has the field's best long run.
Buescher, who qualified fifteenth , ran fourth. Reddick, the points leader, starts eleventh with the third-best pace. The grid hides Sunday's fastest cars.
Every driver the broadcast quoted or singled out, in one place. The grid and the race-pace board barely overlap, and that gap is the whole bet. Larson, Briscoe, Reddick and Buescher own the best ten-lap pace in the field — and three of them start outside the top ten.
The names that qualified up front aren't all backed by the long run: Gibbs has the pole and the track position, but only the seventh-best race pace, and Joey Logano's tenth-place lap outran a fourteenth-place race number. Track position matters at Sonoma — passing is hard and tires fade — but the driver who can run a long green flag at speed is the one who climbs. The value is whoever the market underrates off a starting grid that lies: Reddick from eleventh, Buescher from fifteenth.
We read the whole field the same way in the Saturday Tell , and we handled the O'Reilly side of the weekend first. The race is Sunday afternoon on TNT. The full Cup card drops once the prices are live — we only fire when the number has value.
Read the race-pace board, not the grid. Ty Gibbs has the pole and Shane van Gisbergen is off it for the first time ever — but the fastest long-run cars are Larson, Briscoe, Reddick and Buescher, and three of them start outside the top ten. The value is the speed the starting order hides.
The card comes once the prices are set.