Brett Bodine is almost guaranteed a spot in this year's Daytona 500.

Bodine's lap of 180.941 miles per hour was the fastest of the eight cars that made time-trial runs on Monday. His speed is the 21st fastest overall, which could be important after Thursday's Gatorade Twin 125 qualifying races.

Bodine did not make the field for last year's Daytona 500.

"That was huge," he said. "We were 29th fastest overall yesterday and history shows that the last two years, 25th and 26th were the last ones to get in the Daytona 500 on speed.

"We just felt like we needed to be somewhere around 20th. We needed to be better than that and to gain eight-hundredths of a second and go from 29th to 21st. That was just a huge gain today."

Bodine was able to improve his speed on a dark, damp, cool and dreary day at Daytona.

"The conditions were way worse -- about a 12-mile-per-hour head wind on the back straightaway," Bodine said. "The car actually lost RPM going into (Turn) 3 -- it lost about 100 RPM -- but what it gained down the front straightaway made up the difference.

"It really does feel pretty good. These guys worked so hard all winter. I mean, we've spent endless hours and a tremendous amount of money that we didn't really have in the wind tunnel and trying to get this car as good as we could.

Our goal was to come here and be in the top 20 in speed, and 21st is pretty darn close to that goal. It's all a credit to them. They're the ones that did it, I just held it wide open. That's all you can do."

Only the top two cars in Saturday's qualification session are locked into the field for Sunday's Daytona 500. Those two are Bill Elliott, the pole winner, and Stacy Compton, who was awarded the second position after Jerry Nadeau's speed was disallowed because of rules infractions.

Positions 3-30 will be filled by the top 14 finishers in Thursday's Gatorade Twin 125s -- the two qualifying races, excluding Elliott and Compton.

Positions 31-36 will be filled by time trial speeds with the remainder of the 43-car field determined by provisional starting positions.

"It's going to make supper taste a lot better the next three nights before Thursday because we feel like, no matter what happens on Thursday, we're going to be in the Daytona 500 and it's been a long time since I've been able to say that," Bodine said.

Dave Marcis was the second-fastest Monday qualifier at 180.437 mph followed by Dodge's Jason Leffler.

"I think the wind hung out everybody out there today," Leffler said. "The fuel was contaminated Saturday, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it was going to help us. We qualified 36th, so that certainly was a bad deal. We've got clean fuel in it now, and the car is better. We ran faster in practice today than we ran all week."

Nadeau, who originally was the second fastest qualifier on Saturday before his speed was disallowed, qualified Monday at 178.271 mph.

"We just need to post a time, that's all we're here for," he said. "Then, tomorrow we can work on a race setup. (Crew chief) Tony (Furr) and the guys have worked real hard. The guys at the engine shop have put a lot of time in this motor.