Thomas Merrill drove his No. 26 HP Tuners/Cope Race Cars Ford Mustang to the pole position for this afternoon’s Trans Am Series presented by Pirelli’s CUBE 3 Architecture TA2 Series race at Watkins Glen International as part of the Mission Foods Watkins Glen SpeedTour. Merrill’s lap of 1m49.503s earned him his first pole of the 2024 season. Thomas Annunziata in the No. 90 Bayshore Mortgage/Nitro Motorsports Ford Mustang will start beside Merrill on the front row with a time of 1m49.590s.
“The weekend’s gone OK, so far,” said Merrill. “These shortened weekends are a little tougher for us. We don’t get to do the testing that a lot of other teams do, so we’ve got a lot less time to get our work done. Yesterday, we didn’t quite show what we had. The problem with not showing what we had is we don’t know what we had either. So, it was nice to discover what we had in qualifying today, and the HP Tuners/Cope Mustang was bloody quick. My hope is it stays that way this afternoon, but I’m sure everyone else is going to be quick as well. We just want to finish well and score as many points as we can.”
The race will be contested today at 4:00pm ET. It will air live on MAVTV and can be streamed live here. The highlights show of the CUBE 3 Architecture TA2 Series race will air on MAVTV on Thursday, Aug. 29 at 8:00pm ET.
Qualifying:
1. Thomas Merrill, No. 26 HP Tuners/Cope Race Cars Ford Mustang (1:49.503)
2. Thomas Annunziata, No. 90 Bayshore Mortgage/Nitro Motorsports Mustang (1:49.590)
3. Carson Kvapil, No. 17 Team SLR-M1 Racecars Chevrolet Camaro (1:49.714)
4. Jake Drew, No. 7 Silver Hare Racing Chevrolet Camaro (1:49.854)
5. Ben Maier, No. 80 BOE Marine/Nitro Motorsports Ford Mustang (1:49.969)
Full qualifying results can be found here.