The season-opening practice session for Sunday's Daytona 500 qualifying is in the books and two past Cup Series champions sit atop the leaderboard. The two hour practice session did not feature the dicey packs seen in Friday night's Budweiser Shootout practice, instead the track was typically barren except for three or four cars making mock qualifying runs.

Veteran driver Bill Elliott was the fastest of 56 cars to take a trip around the 2.5-mile tri-oval. "Awesome Bill from Dawsonville" was the only driver to break into the 47 second bracket, running a fast lap of 47.963 seconds at 187.645 mph. Running only twelve races for Wood Brothers Racing, Elliott and the Wood Brothers proved they are not going to settle for just showing up.

"You can't tell about this business," Elliott stated. "Right now, we just need to beat the go-or-go-homers, that's where we need to concentrate and let the rest of it fall where it may. We've got to not make any mistakes and see what tomorrow brings."

Saturday's promising run brought back memories of last year's Daytona frustrations for the single-car team. After running strong in practice, the team burned up a gear in qualifying and ended up missing the historic 50th running of the Daytona 500.

"I felt nearly this good a year ago standing here at this time, but we managed to mess it up in qualifying," team co-owner Len Wood admitted. "We've talked about not beating ourselves this year because last year we beat ourselves."

Joining Elliott atop the leaderboard was 2000 Cup Series champion Bobby Labonte. The former champion laid down a fast lap of 48.022 seconds at 187.414 mph in his No. 96 Ask.com Ford Fusion. "It felt pretty good. The car's pretty fast and I'm pretty happy with it," Labonte told HardcoreRaceFans.com.

After Saturday's practice results, it appears Labonte's offseason move to Hall of Fame Racing/Yates Racing was the right decision. "I think it's going really good. Obviously, the team was in place for a long period of time, it's not like it was two weeks or three weeks ago," Labonte went on to say. "We're just continuing to put everything together. I know everybody's worked real hard all winter long. Even though my name wasn't in the hat until a couple weeks ago, the organization was already there. The big thing is we want to be fast here and our expectation is to hopefully win us a couple of races and be in the Chase at the end of the year."

Fan-favorite and 2004 Daytona 500 winner Dale Earnhardt Jr. posted the third fastest time of the session, while Earnhardt's former teammate Martin Truex Jr. ran the fourth fastest time. Joe Gibbs Racing's Kyle Busch rounded out the rest of the top-5.

During Saturday's opening two-hour session, teams primarily worked on making there cars run as fast as possible for one or two laps. Penske Racing's David Stremme ran the most laps of the session, pacing the track a total of ten times.

After a short break in the action, the 57 cars attempting to qualify for the 51st running of the Daytona 500 are back on the track for their final hour and a half session before tomorrow's time trials. Be sure to check back to HardcoreRaceFans.com for all of the latest news and results throughout the day LIVE from the Daytona International Speedway.