NASCAR Cup Series qualifying results: Daniel Suarez on pole at Indy road course
Suarez topped Tyler Reddick to win the Busch Light Pole for the Verizon 200 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway's road course, though Michael McDowell went on to take the checkered flag.
Daniel Suarez won the Busch Light Pole for the Verizon 200 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway's road course, posting a top qualifying speed of 99.814 mph in the No. 99 Trackhouse Racing Chevrolet to beat Tyler Reddick, according to Yahoo Sports and ESPN's grid data. It was Suarez's third career Cup Series pole and his first at the Indy road course.
Reddick qualified second at 99.649 mph in the No. 45 23XI Racing Toyota, with Chase Elliott third at 99.399 mph and Michael McDowell fourth at 99.288 mph, per ESPN's official qualifying grid for the race.
The pole did not translate into a race win. McDowell took the lead from Suarez on lap 6 of the 85-lap, roughly 200-mile Verizon 200 and held on to win, with Elliott finishing as runner-up. "These guys gave me everything today. I don't know if it was dominant, but it felt dominant to me," McDowell said after the race, according to Yahoo Sports.
The qualifying field
Kyle Busch rounded out the top five in qualifying at 99.218 mph in the No. 8 car. The full field for the 14-turn, 2.43-mile road course featured 39 cars, with William Byron listed without a recorded qualifying speed and starting 39th, per ESPN's grid.
From pole to the checkered flag
Suarez's pole-to-lap-6 lead is consistent with road-course qualifying often being an imperfect predictor of the eventual winner, since McDowell's Front Row Motorsports Ford overtook him early and controlled the race from there. NASCAR.com's own recap of qualifying, published the day of the session, confirmed the winning lap was Suarez's third career Cup Series pole in 239 career starts, adding detail on how rare a pole conversion this was for the Trackhouse Racing driver up to that point.
How McDowell took the lead and closed it out
Additional race-day reporting from Patriot Publishing and Sportskeeda filled in the pass the original sources left undetailed: McDowell, who started fourth, passed Suarez for the lead coming out of the final corner on lap 6, then led 54 of the race's 82 laps -- including the final 30 consecutive laps -- to hold off a late push from Chase Elliott, who finished second with Suarez third. The win was McDowell's first of the season, his first at Indianapolis, and only the second of his Cup Series career, and it also secured him a NASCAR Cup Series playoff berth, according to Patriot Publishing's coverage.
A young event on NASCAR's schedule
The Verizon 200 was the 24th race of the 2023 Cup Series season and only the third time NASCAR's premier series had raced on Indianapolis Motor Speedway's road-course layout, according to Wikipedia's race summary corroborated against NASCAR.com's own event page. The road-course event replaced the Brickyard 400, the oval race NASCAR had run at the speedway every year from 1994 through 2020; the switch to the 2.439-mile, 14-turn road course began with the 2021 season. The original 1994 Brickyard 400 on the oval drew more than 250,000 spectators and was, at the time, the most-attended single-day sporting event in NASCAR history, a scale the newer road-course event has not been reported to match in the sources reviewed.
US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by Yahoo Sports and ESPN. It restores a story originally published on this site in August 2023; figures are as reported at the time.