HAMPTON, Ga. — Denny Hamlin started chasing the championship during qualifying Saturday at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Mired in a bit of a midseason slump, Hamlin showed signs of turning things around by claiming the pole for today’s NASCAR Sprint Cup race with a speed of 187.380 mph. He edged traditionally strong qualifier Ryan Newman, who’ll start from the outside of the front row after a lap of 187.070.

The rest of the top five for the Emory Healthcare 500 was Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards and Tony Stewart.

“I’m a very bad qualifier,” Hamlin said, “so I’ll take it.”

He claimed the eighth pole of his career and the 50th for Joe Gibbs Racing, which won its first pole with Bobby Labonte at Martinsville in 1995.

Hamlin has five wins this season, but it’s been nearly three months since his last victory. He’s coming off a 34th-place finish at Bristol and is fifth in the point standings.

While that’s still safely within the 12-driver Chase for the Championship, which will be set at Richmond next week, Hamlin wants to recapture the dominance he showed over a 10-race stretch that included five wins and two other top-five finishes.

“I feel like the last 10 races have definitely been up and down for our team,” he said. “We were on such a hot streak there. We kind of got spoiled. The regular season was kind of irrelevant at that point because we knew we were going to get in the Chase.”

Hamlin said the team started racing for victories instead of points.

“We’re going to treat these next two weeks as if we’re Chase racing,” he said. “We found ourselves going for wins so much, going all-out for wins, that it probably hurt us in the long run. These next two weeks, we’re going back to points racing.”

Hamlin wanted to get that new attitude started with a strong qualifying run, and that’s just what he got from his No. 11 Toyota Camry.

“We brought our best stuff,” he said. “I’m trying to get cautiously optimistic, but that’s the fastest car I’ve ever had on the race track. It was very, very, very good.”

If all goes according to plan, Hamlin will have a couple of high finishes — maybe even another win or two — heading into the 10-race Chase.

“I’m trying to do the best I can to pretend the Chase starts here,” he said. “Hopefully, we can start some momentum now, so we’re really hitting our stride when the Chase starts.”

Failing to make the 43-car field were Jason Leffler, Landon Cassill, Scott Riggs and Todd Bodine.

McMurray holds off Busch to win Nationwide race

HAMPTON, Ga. — Jamie McMurray’s first win of the season is making Kyle Busch wait for another try at Nationwide Series history.

McMurray held off Busch to win the Great Clips 300 Nationwide Series race Saturday night at Atlanta Motor Speedway.

Busch, trying to become the first driver in the 28-year history of the Nationwide Series to win 11 races in a season, fell short in his late efforts to catch McMurray.

Busch led the most laps in the race but finished second, ahead of Carl Edwards and less than a second behind McMurray. McMurray, who raced to his first Nationwide Series win in Atlanta in 2002, won for the first time since 2004 in Darlington.

Sam Ard won 10 Nationwide races in 1983. Busch matched that mark in 2008. Busch’s 10th win this season came on Aug. 20 in Bristol, Tenn.

— The Associated Press