Kyle Busch on the pole for Martinsville playoff
MARTINSVILLE, Va. —
Kyle Busch’s road to the championship round was made a little bit easier when he won the pole at Martinsville Speedway on Saturday.
Busch turned a lap at 96.254 mph around the Virginia paperclip to earn the top starting spot in Sunday’s Monster Energy Cup race — the first of the third round of NASCAR’s playoffs. Eight drivers remain eligible for the title, but only four will advance to the season finale shootout.
A victory in any of the three races in this round of the playoffs earns a driver an automatic berth.
Clint Bowyer qualified second in a Ford from Stewart-Haas Racing, which has all four of its drivers in the field of eight. SHR teammate Aric Almirola qualified fifth, Kurt Busch was seventh
and Kevin Harvick 13th. Chase Elliott was the lowest-qualifying playoff driver at 21st.
In other motor sports news:
• Johnny Sauter will again race for the Camping World Truck championship, getting an automatic berth into the finals by winning at Martinsville Speedway. The victory, in the opening race of the series' round of six, was good for one of the four slots in the Nov. 16 season finale. Brett Moffitt ,a playoff driver, finished second and was followed by non-title contenders Myatt Snider, Ben Rhodes and Kyle Benjamin. Red Bull's Daniel
Ricciardo snatched the pole position from teammate Max Verstappen at the Mexican Grand Prix, while Mercedes' Lewis Hamilton is in perfect position in third to win his fifth career Formula One championship. Verstappen dominated practice, but Ricciardo got him at the end of qualifying with a lap of 1 minute, 14.759 seconds in the high altitude at the Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez in Mexico City, edging Verstappen by 0.026 seconds. Hamilton needs only to finish seventh to win a title that would match him with the late Juan Manuel
Fangio for second-most in F1 history.
GOLF Finau maintains Champions lead
Tony Finau closed with three consecutive birdies for a 2-under-par 70 and took advantage of a late collapse by Justin Rose to keep his three-shot lead in the HSBC Champions at Shanghai.
Finau was on the verge of falling three shots behind until he rolled in a 20-foot birdie putt from off the green at the 16th, hit a tee shot that rolled to within 18 inches on the par-3 17th and finished with a 12-foot birdie putt on 18.
Rose's tee shot on the 17th bounced in the hazard and led to double bogey. He hit into the water on the 18th and made bogey for a 70.
Finau was at 13-under 203 and three strokes ahead of Rose, Masters champion Patrick Reed (70) and Xander Schauffele (69). In other news: • Cameron Champ shot an 8-under 64 to open a four-stroke lead in the Sanderson Farms Championship at Jackson, Miss. Corey Conners was second, matching Champ with a 64 to get to 13 under. D.J. Trahan (67), the 2006 winner when the event was the Southern Farm Bureau Classic, was five strokes back with Shawn Stefani (68).
• Nelly Korda shot a 3-under 69 to share the lead with Wei-Ling Hsu after three rounds of the LPGA Taiwan Championship at Taoyuan City, Taiwan. Playing in front of a home crowd, Hsu finished
with an even-72. Korda and Hsu are at 9under 207, and both will be looking for their first LPGA titles in Sunday's final round. • Miguel Angel Jimenez shot his second consecutive 4-under 68 to take the second-round lead in the PGA Tour Champions' Invesco QQQ Championship at Thousand Oaks,Calif. Second in the season points standings, Jimenez has a onestroke lead over Stephen Ames, Michael Bradley and Scott Parel in the second of the tour's three playoff events.
TENNIS Stephens, Pliskova advance to final
Sloane Stephens overcame a terrible start against Karolina Pliskova to win 0-6, 6-4, 6-1 at the WTA Finals in Singapore, setting up a championship match against Elina Svitolina.
Both Svitolina and Stephens posted 3-0 roundrobin records before winning their semifinals.
Svitolina advanced to the season-ending final after beating Kiki Bertens 7-5, 6-7 (5), 6-4.
In other news:
• Roger Federer advanced to the 14th Swiss Indoors final of his career by beating seventh-seeded
Daniil Medvedev 6-1, 6-4.Seeking a ninth title at his hometown event at Basel and a 99th overall, Federer will play 93thranked Marius Copil on Sunday. Copil upset expectations of a Federer final against Alexander Zverev with a 6-3, 6-7 (6), 6-4 victory in the earlier semifinal.
COLLEGE BASKETBALL Texas suspends guard Roach
Texas senior guard
Kerwin Roach II was suspended for the Longhorns' season opener against Eastern Illinois on Nov. 6 for a violation of team rules.
Roach announced the suspension on social media about the same time the school issued a statement. Neither statement disclosed the nature of the violation. Both said it happened “last year.”
Roach also will miss the team’s preseason scrimmages. In other news:
• Iona senior forward
Roland Griffin said he was kicked off the basketball team after an altercation with an assistant coach. Griffin told Stadium that he punched assistant coach Garfield Johns multiple times in selfdefense last Monday after a verbal argument in the locker room. The website reported that Griffin met with head coach Tim
Cluess and then was told by the school he would face a disciplinary suspension that will bar him from campus activities through the end of May 2020. The report said Johns was hospitalized briefly with a head injury and later released.
WINTER SPORTS Worley captures World Cup opener
Tessa Worley mastered tough conditions to win the season-opening women's World Cup giant slalom.
While snowfall and low clouds limited visibility, the two-time world champion from France found the fastest way down the Rettenbach glacier at Soelden, Austria, in a sparkling final run. Trailing leader Federica Brignone by fourtenths of a second after the first run, Worley posted the fastest time in the final run and beat the Italian by 0.35 for her 13th career win. Olympic GS champion
Mikaela Shiffrin of the United States finished 0.94 behind in third.