Brandon Jones ran the fastest lap and starts 11th. Sam Mayer was ninth on the pylon and first over 10, 15 and 20 laps. Allgaier owns the 25 and 30 and starts ninth. Corey Day ran 70 straight laps and starts 26th. Qualifying was cancelled and the metric set the grid. Every car, every window.
Intercepted Audio “ ” Brandon Jones ended practice P1 on the pylon. Sam Mayer is eighth there and first over 10, 15 and 20 laps. Justin Allgaier owns the 25 and 30.
Corey Day ran 70 straight laps without stopping. The points leader was 24th over 15 laps and sideways once. Then qualifying was cancelled after four cars ran, the metric set the grid, and the best long-run car in the field wound up 26th on it.
By PitByNumbers Staff · Bristol Motor Speedway · Friday, September 18, 2026 · 7:30 PM ET · The CW The session was 50 minutes, one set of tires per car for practice, and NASCAR allowed teams to pull a set from the race allotment for a mock qualifying run if they wanted one. The broadcast said three cars did and named Landon Huffman as one of them. The lap chart shows the same opening pattern on three cars, Huffman, Jake Finch and Sammy Smith, each a three or four-lap burst and then a long sit.
Everyone else ran the session on the one set, which is why the fast laps came late: Jones on his 64th lap of 66, Allgaier on his 87th of 88, Mayer on his 74th of 78, Crews on his 69th of 71. Of the 35 runs of 20 laps or more in the field, 34 got faster from their first five laps to their last five. The track came to the cars.
It did not come to all of them equally. Read the board accordingly. The 5 and 10-lap columns are the restart.
The 15, 20, 25 and 30-lap columns are the race, and Friday night is three stages of 85, 85 and 130 laps on a surface that spent the afternoon getting faster. Ryan Sieg owns the 5-lap column and has no 20-lap number. Mayer owns the 10, 15 and 20.
Allgaier owns the 25 and 30. Corey Day ran 70 laps in a row and Carson Kvapil ran 66, and between them they have the fourth and sixth-best 30-lap averages in the field and the 12th and 18th-best single laps. Qualifying was supposed to sort this out and got four cars in, Huffman, Yeley, Decker and Finch, in that order, with Yeley on top, before the hold.
None of it counted. The START column is the metric grid, and it disagrees with this board almost everywhere: Corey Day starts 26th, Anthony Alfredo 19th, Brandon Jones 11th with the fastest lap of the day, and Sheldon Creed second. Nobody, which on an 85-degree Friday at Bristol is its own story.
The closest calls were slides, not contact. Sheldon Creed hung the right rear out on one run, the booth watched it step sideways, and he came back to the pit area. The car that broke did it from the inside: Nick Sanchez had fluid coming into the cockpit with 20 minutes left, the replay showed the left rear poking out, and the booth read it as the rear end detached.
Parker Retzlaff cut a right rear 15 to 17 laps into his opening run and NASCAR let the 99 replace it without touching the race allotment. Qualifying got four cars in before the lightning, Huffman, Yeley, Decker and Finch, and none of them hit anything. Then the session was cancelled, so none of it counted, and the 39th car on the metric, Huffman's, went home without turning a race lap.
The sheet metal is waiting on the weather. Our O'Reilly card posted before a practice lap turned: Kvapil to win at +450 for 2.0 units, Creed to win at +1000 for 1.0 and top three at +220 for 1.5, Crews to win at +1000 for 1.0 and top three at +230 for 1.5. Practice graded one of the three up, left one where it was, and made the third uncomfortable.
Crews is the one that went up: second on the pylon, fifth over 5 laps, seventh over 25 and 30, and a driver who said on air that the top lane is coming in faster than he has ever seen it, which is where he went 17th to 3rd here in April. Kvapil is where he was, with a caveat we did not have when the card went up: the long run is a top-six car, the short run is a 15th-place car, and his crew chief said out loud that they do not have the spring setup yet. The win price is a bet on 130 green laps at the end.
Creed is the uncomfortable one. Twenty-fourth over 15 laps and 21st over 10 is not a points leader's practice, and we are not going to pretend the sideways moment did not happen. The file that priced him at +1000 says trophy or wrecker.
Friday said neither, and the top-three ticket at +220 is the one that survives a middling car better than the win ticket does. The four names practice says we should have priced and did not are Mayer, Allgaier, Gray and Day, and we will say that in public the same way we said Chandler Smith on Thursday, when he started on the front row and we had no ticket on him. The grid moved all of it again.
Qualifying was cancelled, the metric set the field, and it does not read the same sheet we do: Mayer starts third and Kvapil fourth, which helps us, Creed starts second off a practice that earned nothing like it, and Allgaier, the best long-run car in the building, starts ninth. Day starts 26th. The car that ran 70 straight laps and got faster doing it has 25 cars in front of it at a track where the booth spent the afternoon saying you cannot come from behind.
That is the single biggest gap between what Friday showed and what Friday night pays, and if you want one number to watch after the first stage, it is the 17 car's. The full O'Reilly card is posted with the arithmetic on every play, and the Cup card for Saturday night lands in the inbox first, at noon. Jones has the fastest lap and a top-five number in three windows.
Mayer has the best 10, 15 and 20-lap car in the field and nobody on the pylon would know it. Allgaier has the best 25 and 30 and a soft restart. Day ran 70 laps without stopping and got faster the whole way.
Gray is second over 25 and 30 and eleventh on the single lap, which is the shape of a car that finishes third. Those five are the race. Our money is on the other side of the sheet: a rookie with the second-fastest lap and a soft middle, a points leader whose practice does not match his file, and a favorite whose crew chief says the spring car is not back yet.
Practice at Bristol is a pylon that lies and a stopwatch that does not, and on Friday the stopwatch said the JR Motorsports cars and the 20 are the class of the field and the top lane belongs to an 18-year-old. Then the weather took the grid away from both of them and handed it to a formula. Love leads them to green, Creed starts second off the worst sheet of any contender, and the best long-run car in the field starts ninth while the longest run of the day starts 26th.
That is the race.