Stormy Skies Prevent Sprint Cup Qualifying

FanHouse's Geoffrey Miller is in Chicago for Saturday night's LifeLock 400.

The only thing driving Thursday night at Chicagoland Speedway was the rain.

Rain canceled the last 12 minutes of the Sprint Cup Series' first practice Thursday afternoon at Chicagoland Speedway, but storms of a stronger magnitude wiped out the first night-time qualifying session to be ever held at the speedway.

The earlier rain had pushed qualifying back over an hour and a half as crews worked to dry the track, but drivers and teams were still gearing up for the session as bigger clouds began building northwest of the speedway.

Eventually, those clouds got darker and quite a bit scarier, forcing fans from the grandstands and causing a manic rush in the garage area to get the cars off of pit road and back under cover. The pictures on the right show a time period of about 20 minutes as the clouds got progressively closer and ominously darker.

As a result, Sprint Cup point leader Kyle Busch will be on the pole for Saturday night's LifeLock 400 -- also the first nighttime event in Chicago for the Sprint Cup Series. Dale Earnhardt Jr. will start alongside thanks to the owner point standings that NASCAR sets the field with in case of a canceled qualifying session.

Greg Biffle laid down a lap of 179.748mph in the practice session for the session's top speed, but won't have the chance to vie for the Coors Light pole award. He'll start 11th.

Johnny Sauter in the No. 08 FUBAR car and Tony Raines in the No. 34 unsponsored ride missed the race, and coincidentally enough, were the two slowest cars in practice.