2026 Spring Darlington Qualifying Notes

Your 2026 Spring Darlington qualifying notes focus on how the spread is spreading with the new rules package in effect this race.

Comp: 2025 Spring Darlington

We can make a 1:1 comparison with last year’s spring race. The primary differences:

• The 2026 race is two weeks earlier than the 2025.
• It was warmer in 2026: 87F per MRN radio in 2026 and about 80F in 2025 per weatherspark

What’s Different

Pole Speed (Sort of Different)

Pole speed: 29.072 s by Tyler Reddick n 2026 vs. 28.774 s in 2025 by William Byron. This year was about a third of a second slower than last year’s pace. Both years featured a single round of qualifying.

Compare those speeds with the spring races in:

• 2024: 28.906 s
• 2023: 29.028 s
• 2022: 28.805 s

Importantly: Each of these times were achieved in the second round of two-round qualifying.

This year’s qualifying pole time is not all that much different from what it was 2023. The fastest first-round qualifying time in 2023 was 29.084.

The Spread is Spreading

The most interesting thing to me is how differently the qualifying times are spread out.

Comparing Positions	2026 difference (seconds)	2025 difference (difference)
P1 – P2	0.124	0.114
P1 – P5	0.352	0.121
P1 – P10	0.466	0.198
P1 – P15	0.552	0.227
P1 – P20	0.659	0.398

A number of drivers predicted that making the cars harder to drive would result in a bigger spread and (based on a sample of n=1) it has.

The difference from P1 to P2 is similar; however, last year’s difference from P1 to P5 was 0.121 seconds while this year, it’s 0.352 seconds.

This year, the top three qualifiers are separated by about 0.123 seconds. That’s 0.124 seconds from Reddick to Bubba Wallace and another 0.123 seconds from Wallace to Chase Elliott. The gap from P5 to P31 is 0.573 seconds. That’s 27 drivers within almost 6/10th of a second of each other.

The last five drivers (Connor Zilisch, Shane van Gisbergen, Cody Ware, Cole Custer and Ty Dillon, again, excluding the 66) fall off much more. From Zilisch to Dillon is a gap of almost a half-second.

In 2025, the top four qualifiers were all within about 0.1 seconds of the pole sitter.

The spread from P1 to P10 in 2025 was about 0.2 seconds, compared with 0.466 seconds this year.

Last year’s spread from the pole to the 20th position was only about 0.4 seconds, while this year’s is 0.66 seconds.

There’s a 1.5-s spread between the pole speed this year and the last legit qualifying time. (I’m excluding the No. 66, which was almost three seconds back from the pole time.) In 2025, that difference was just about the same.

It’s hard to compare any further back because there were two rounds of qualifying in the more recent years rather than just one.

The Attitude

Drivers are normally enthusiastic when they’re at Darlington, but the new package seems to have raised hopes quite a bit. Maybe a little more than the results so far call for. The drivers have been proclaiming loudly that more horsepower is the answer to all the Gen-7’s short-track woes. So they need for this to work.

And that’s your 2026 spring Darlington qualifying report.