Average Practice Speeds: Charlotte – Coca-Cola 600

This week’s race at Charlotte Motor Speedway is the longest race of the season at 600 miles, and many teams will have a limit on how many laps they allow the drivers to run in practice. Luckily for you, I created a “Lap Logger” page that lists all the drivers in order depending on how many miles they ran in the three practice sessions of the weekend. You can find that by clicking here. Here’s how the weekend was in terms of when the cars were on the track: first practice was on Thursday afternoon when it was really hot out, and then qualifying was later that evening. Richard Petty Motorsports looked strong once again at Charlotte (remember last year?) and Aric Almirola took the pole with teammate Marcos Ambrose qualifying 2nd. You can find the full starting lineup by clicking here. There were then two practice sessions on Saturday morning/early afternoon. Why they didn’t let the cars on the track on Friday night is beyond me.

Important Practice Notes: If you watch the “Live” Leaderboard on NASCAR.com, you probably noticed that it was completely blank for the first practice on Saturday and still somewhat broken during Happy Hour.. No surprise there, as that website has more glitches on a week-to-week basis than the rest that I visit combined. With the lap tracker not working, I had no way of getting a good calculation of average speeds this week. Therefore, you won’t find any average speed chart as normal. However, here are the results from all practices this weekend at Charlotte as well as ten-lap averages:

In the first practice session, the five fastest drivers were:
1. Marcos Ambrose – 189.215 mph
2. Landon Cassill – 189.182 mph
3. A.J. Allmendinger – 188.409 mph
4. Greg Biffle – 188.344 mph
5. Clint Bowyer – 188.016 mph
Click here for the complete results from this practice.

In the second practice (first on Saturday), these drivers topped the speed chart:
1. Denny Hamlin – 186.239 mph
2. Paul Menard – 186.123 mph
3. Carl Edwards – 186.021 mph
4. Kyle Busch – 185.970 mph
5. Martin Truex, Jr. – 185.899 mph
Click here for the complete results from this practice.

In terms of ten-lap average, the top five for the second practice were:
1. Martin Truex, Jr. – 183.644 mph
2. Brad Keselowski – 186.564 mph
3. Paul Menard – 183.149 mph
4. Jimmie Johnson – 182.653 mph
5. Mark Martin – 182.486 mph
Click here for the complete ten-lap average chart for practice two.

In “Happy Hour”, the fast five were:
1. Brad Keselowski – 183.692 mph
2. Carl Edwards – 183.349 mph
3. Mark Martin – 183.231 mph
4. Jimmie Johnson – 183.231 mph
5. Joey Logano – 182.921 mph
Click here for the complete results from this practice.

When it came to ten-lap average, the best for Happy Hour were:
1. Jimmie Johnson – 181.173 mph
2. Denny Hamlin – 180.150 mph
3. Mark Martin – 179.962 mph
4. Paul Menard – 179.920 mph
5. Kevin Harvick – 179.793 mph
Click here for the complete ten-lap average chart for Happy Hour.