Tag: Legacy Motor Club

Erik Jones describes his health as “pretty much 100%” two months after suffering a compression fracture of a lower vertebra in his back at Talladega Superspeedway.

“I feel good,” Jones said at Iowa Speedway. “There’s still some occasional pain here and there, but it’s nothing a lot different than what I had before with racing. So, I feel good and am doing normal stuff.

“I ran a late model again (before Iowa). Everything has been feeling pretty good.”

Jones was injured during a frontal impact in Turn 3 when his Legacy Motor Club Toyota Camry was hit from behind in a bump draft accordion gone wrong. The seven-car Toyota teammate draft with 33 laps to go was set to leapfrog the field on strategy before the incident.

The injury sidelined Jones for two NASCAR Cup Series races (Dover and Kansas). He returned with a 19th-place finish at Darlington Raceway.

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But whereas Jones feels normal, it has been anything but for the No. 43 team in recent weeks. Over the last five weeks, Jones has finished no better than 19th (three times) and has fallen to 26th in the championship standings.

“We’re not where we want to be,” Jones said.

It was an unfortunate twist of fate. The day before Jones was injured, he spoke optimistically about the team’s outlook and hunting for a postseason spot. At the time — the end of the season’s first quarter — Jones was 19th in the championship standings with four top-15 finishes.

“It’s kind of crazy (that) we went to Talladega and felt pretty good and felt like we were getting better, and Talladega was going to be a good finish for us,” Jones said. “Then, after that, I came back and it feels like nothing has been good since. Fortunately — or unfortunately — that’s shared across the board. The 42 [John Hunter Nemechek] has been struggling as well since then.

“It’s hard when you sit out a couple of weeks and you don’t know the direction things are going and you come back, and it’s different. We have to get better, in general, but we have to unload better. That’s been our big struggle.”

The team was “way off” to start at Sonoma Raceway and Jones qualified 38th. A snowball effect occurs where it then takes nearly the entire race to make up ground and get the car better.

The same happened at Iowa Speedway, where Jones qualified 32nd. And as he anticipated, it was a tough race on a new racetrack and with a tire that gave many teams fits. Jones was one of the drivers with a right-front failure, finishing 32nd.

“We’ve been able to salvage some decent finishes, but it’s not because we’ve had good speed,” Jones said. “We’ve had good strategy; the races have played out; and we stayed out of wrecks.

“We just need to get the speed back, and that’s bringing better cars to unload.”

Jones is 159 points below the playoff grid cutline with nine races left in the regular season. Daytona and Darlington are the final two races of the regular season, and both are tracks where Jones has previously been victorious.

It will be a while before Legacy Motor Club finds itself on solid ground as a Toyota team and all the change and growth that’s come with it materializes. Erik Jones, however, can already forecast a different outlook for the season.

“I think last year going in, we were a little unsure, and then obviously after we announced the change to Toyota, we knew it was going to be a long season,” Jones said Wednesday during Daytona 500 media day. “This year, it’s different. We feel like we’re starting, probably not totally where we want to be, because I don’t feel like we’ve had enough time and I think most would agree with that in the shop. We just need more time to keep building these things out internally that we need to. But there’s a lot more anticipation and hope.

“We have a much clearer path and direction of where we’re going to end up and what we need to do to build and where we need to build. Obviously, we’ve got great partners now (with) AdventHealth this weekend, Family Dollar, (and) Dollar Tree coming on. So, there’s a lot more resounding optimism from everybody starting the year off than there’s been in years past.”

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Jones enters his fourth season driving the No. 43 car. He has been along for the ride through multiple iterations of the race team, different teammates and many other changes. It hasn’t been smooth sailing by any means with the ebbs and flows of performance, but Jones has entered each season with as much optimism as possible.

This time, there appears no need for Jones to force any positivity ahead of the Daytona 500. Despite the continued work behind the scenes, there is potential and more stability.

“It’s been interesting; it’s just been a long road for me in Cup and not just in the 43 car,” he said. “I come in (the series) in the 20, and then I come to the 43, and we’ve gone through so many changes with personnel, ownership, manufacturer, internally, team — so every year has been a grind. This year started no different. It’s a grind right now for us just because we’re working hard to try to hit the ground in the right direction. So, every year has been that grind, but this year doesn’t feel like a lost cause.

“Sometimes it feels like you’re just working and working and working, and everything is pushing back against you. I feel like we’re working hard, and things are pushing for us. We’ve got a lot of people in our corner that are pushing and saying, ‘OK, you guys are working hard, putting the work in. We want to see you run well.’ Toyota wants us to run well. Our group wants to run well. But I think the manufacturer support is the biggest thing. Having a manufacturer that wants you to go out and succeed can make a big difference.”

Legacy Motor Club switched from Chevrolet to Toyota over the winter, giving the manufacturer two (occasionally three) additional cars in the Cup Series. It is the first time since 2011 that Toyota has had eight full-time teams.

However, the organization does not have an alliance partner like in previous years. Legacy Motor Club is standing on its own, even its pit crews, beginning this season while having more resources available through the Toyota partnership. It’s also a partnership that allowed for employee growth and department expansion at the race shop.

“Overall, the possibilities are somewhat endless, but we still have to use the data in the right way and get things going in the right way,” Jones said. “We’ve done the work that we can do at this point, and now we have to get out and get racing and see where we stack up and go to work from there. That part isn’t much different from years past, but if we start on the wrong foot, we at least have probably a better direction and resources to get to where we want to be quicker.”

The expectation is Legacy Motor Club has nowhere to go but up this season. There are two superspeedways to start the year (Daytona and Atlanta) before the series heads west to a traditional mile-and-a-half, followed by two short tracks (Phoenix and Bristol) and a road course before the end of March. Jones can see the expectations changing as the season progresses but believes Legacy will know where they stand pretty quickly.

“You want to set expectations high, just because things are better now than they have been for us, but they’re much different too,” Jones said. “We’ve relied on alliances since I’ve been in the 43 car and that’s a huge department in itself that we’re currently building to fill that gap … Everybody is still trying to learn their role, and we’re still working hard on the sim. I was on the sim all the way up to yesterday trying to work on stuff to get better for races going forward past here and Atlanta. So, things are still being built out a lot now, and obviously, we’re getting going.

“There’s a lot of work to do still at this point but once we’re done with Vegas and Phoenix, we’ll have a good sense of where we’re at. Vegas has been a good track, historically, for us. Phoenix has been a little hit or miss, but I think we will have a good judge on probably where our short-track program is at. Excited to get there? No, but I hope it’s good, too.”