Hank Parker Jr. scores top-10 starting spot.

Hank Parker Jr. and the No. 36 GNC Live Well Racing team will roll off from the fourth row in Saturday's EAS/GNC Live Well 300 NASCAR Busch Series (NBS) event.

Parker claimed the eighth-place starting position during Thursday morning qualifying at Daytona International Speedway (DIS) with a lap of 48.691 seconds at an average speed of 184.839 mph.

The top-10 starting spot is Parker's best in five qualifying attempts at the 2.5-mile DIS facility. His previous highest start was 30th, which came in the 2000 NBS event at the track.

"I'm thrilled with a top-10 start," Parker said. "It's going to be nice to be able to see the front of the field when the green flag drops on Saturday. I've gotten a top-10 and a top-15 finish here when we started toward the back, I can't wait to see what we can do starting near the front."

Parker says he feels his GNC Live Well Dodge was capable of an even better lap time, but he knew from the time he began his qualifying run that the car's handling wouldn't allow for a faster lap.

"The car was really comfortable to drive," Parker said. "Any other time, that's a great thing, but during qualifying you want to be a little more on the edge. I'm not complaining, but the only way I could have had gone faster would have been for the car to be a little looser."

Parker's eighth-place qualifying effort put him in the identical position where he sat after the first practice session of the week. The NBS competitors hit the track on Tuesday morning for the first time. Parker put his No. 36 entry eighth on the practice sheet.

His Welliver-Jesel Motorsports team went backward during subsequent practice sessions on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, ending up 23rd and 24th, respectively, on the speed charts.

"On Tuesday afternoon, we tried a couple of things in practice that slowed us down," crew chief Gary Cogswell said. "You make educated guesses as to how to speed up. Sometimes those guesses work out, sometimes they don't."

"On Wednesday morning, we never got a clean second practice qualifying lap. Every time we tried, we'd have other cars jump out in front of us on the track and Hank would have to hit the brakes. We knew we were better than the practice sheet showed, we just didn't know how much better."

Cogswell said that practice times at DIS can be misleading, even under the best of circumstances. "When I worked with Mike McLaughlin and we sat on the pole a few years back, we were never better than seventh or eighth on the speed chart during practice," Cogswell said. "On the other hand, I've been in situations where we were pretty good on the speed chart and ended up 20th or 25th. I'm happy this deal worked out in our favour, but I never doubted that our team could pull off a top-10 qualifying effort."

The pole for Saturday's event went to Joe Nemechek and his No. 87 entry. Nemechek's time was 48.321 seconds at an average speed of 186.254 mph.

The EAS/GNC Live Well 300 will air live from DIS on Saturday, Feb. 16. Live coverage begins at 1 p.m. ET on TNT and at 12:30 p.m. ET on MRN radio.