In Texas, Johnson looks to end long skid

FORT WORTH — Maybe Jimmie Johnson can do something old at Texas, and get back into Victory Lane.

With his career-long winless streak at 65 races since a win at Dover in June 2017, Johnson is the polesitter in his No. 48 Chevrolet Camaro for today’s Auto Parts 500 at the 1½-mile Texas track where he is a seven-time winner. It is his first pole anywhere since 2016, the season he won the last of his seven NASCAR Cup championships.

And maybe this will be the first race of 2019 that someone wins other than a driver from Joe Gibbs Racing or Team Penske, though one of them won both lower-series races at Texas this weekend. Each of those teams won three of the first six Cup races.

Gibbs driver Kyle Busch will have a shot at a Texas tripleheader weekend sweep after winning both the Xfinity and Truck Series races. He completed such tripleheader sweeps at Bristol in 2010 and 2017.

Johnson and his Hendrick Motorsports teammates William Byron and Chase Elliott are starting in the top three spots. Daniel Suarez qualified fourth for Stewart-Haas Racing.

“It’s week to week. I think that everyone on the West Coast was kind of tied into however they built their cars it was done, and they were kind of stuck through the West Coast,” JGR driver Denny Hamlin said. “But I think now this is the first mile-and-ahalf we’ve had back where people have learned from the West Coast and made adjustments. Certainly, this weekend you can see a shift in cars that are fast that hadn’t been in the past.”

Hamlin, who won the opener at Daytona and has finished no worse than 11th this season, had the fastest lap at 186.987 mph in the only practice Saturday, when temperatures were around 50 degrees — about 20 degrees cooler than Friday.

XFINITY: Busch rocketed ahead of Tyler Reddick on the final restart with six laps remaining. He led 33 of the 200 laps, won for the third time in four Xfinity starts this season and got his 95th career victory in the series.