By Andy Walter

DOVER — Ross Chastain has the right to feel as confident as any NASCAR Cup driver right now.

After all, the 29-year-old owns six top-five finishes in the last eight races.

But even Chastain admits he felt nervous looking over Dover Motor Speedway on Saturday morning.

“This place is intimidating,” Chastain said before practice and qualifying. “Walking in across the crossover bridge is a good reminder for how hard this place is, especially with this new car.

“I’m nervous. That’s what I feel right now. I feel prepared, but just the unknowns of it has the potential to be really volatile behind the wheel with the setup.”

That new car — NASCAR’s latest Next Gen version — will be making its Monster Mile debut in the Cup Duramax Drydene 400 on Sunday (3 p.m., FS1).
It’s lent an air of mystery to how things will play out once they start racing for real on the one-mile concrete oval.

Alex Bowman won this race last spring but that doesn’t make him any more certain than any other driver.

“It’s really interesting coming to a lot of these race tracks not really knowing what to expect,” said Bowman, who will start sixth in the race. “The setups are almost a guess. It’s completely based off of simulation and hoping that we get it right; and you really can’t change much once you’re here.”

Bowman said what worries him is that cars already have a tendency to get loose when they’re entering and exiting the high-banked corners of the Monster Mile. He said being too loose can be a problem with the Next Gen car.

“With this car, you can be a little loose,” said Bowman. “But if you’re really loose, you really can’t catch it. You kind of just don’t have the feel and end up backwards most of the time. Hopefully we can avoid that.

“I keep getting asked how it’s going to play out all week and I don’t know. I think a lot of it is going to be dependent on the tire.”

Even Chris Buescher, who won the pole for the Cup race on Saturday, said the only way anybody will know how the Next Gen car really handles at Dover will be to run an actual race.

Buescher won his first career Cup pole with a speed of 160.149 mph.

“This is one we’ve had circled,” he said about Dover. “There were a lot of meetings, a lot of talk about this event coming up. And I think we ended with a whole more questions than answers.”

The Monster Mile has always been a favorite track for Martin Truex, Jr. The 41-year-old New Jersey native has three victories here and eight top-five finishes in the last 10 races.

But he said even that history of success won’t mean a whole lot on Sunday because of the new car.

Truex, Jr. will start 18th in Sunday’s race.

But Truex, Jr. said he’s always enjoyed working with his team to figure things out.

“I don’t think too much about what I like better or worse about the car,” he said. “It is what it is and you’ve got to deal with it.

“Having experience around this track brings confidence to know what you might want is important,” Truex, Jr. said on Saturday. “But we only have 20 minutes (during qualifying) to figure that out. ... I think most of our speed was found between Monday and yesterday.”

Sports editor Andy Walter can be reached at 302-741-8227 or walter@iniusa.org.

Follow on Twitter at @DSNSports.