NASCAR: Erik Jones still fighting for a competitive ride

Erik Jones knows he won’t be at Joe Gibbs Racing next year, but he still has a lot to fight for whenever he competes in the NASCAR Cup Series.

It was announced in early August that the 2020 NASCAR Cup Series season would be Erik Jones’s third and final season behind the wheel of the #20 Toyota for Joe Gibbs Racing, as the team opted not to extend his deal and instead promoted Christopher Bell to his seat.

Bell, who currently competes for the Joe Gibbs Racing-affiliated Leavine Family Racing, won 15 races for Joe Gibbs Racing in the 2018 and 2019 Xfinity Series prior to his Cup Series promotion.

With Leavine Family Racing having been sold for 2021, Joe Gibbs had to promote him to Jones’s seat to avoid having him get away to a rival organization.

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Two months later, Jones is still searching for another ride, although he told Beyond the Flag that he feels as though a new deal is “pretty close” and that this deal would be in the Cup Series.

When it was confirmed that Jones wouldn’t be back with the team next year, only 20 races on this year’s 36-race schedule had been completed.

Eleven races later, we spoke to Jones and asked him what keeps him motivated to keep going out there and competing, especially doing so for a team he knows decided to move on from him after the year.

Is it the thrill of victory? Is it the prospect of landing a new ride?

Putting a further damper on Jones’s season was the fact that he missed the playoffs for the first time as a Joe Gibbs Racing driver following his first winless regular season since his rookie year with Furniture Row Racing in 2017.

Is it the potential to be the top non-playoff driver or even play spoiler to the championship contenders with a playoff win?

“It’s a little bit of everything,” he stated. “You want to go out there and win and finish out your season strong. I don’t think by any means when I found that out I thought ‘well, whatever, I’m going to go ride around the rest of the season.’ My mentality was that ‘hey, I’m going to hopefully go out there and be able to prove why I deserve to be here.’

“And we still want to win here before the season’s over, and part of that and running well is just showing that you still deserve to be in a top ride in the Cup Series. So I think it was a little bit of a combination of all those things, but I still want to race at the Cup level in a competitive ride and there are still a lot of things that I want to do there. So all of those things combined kind of keep me motivated to go out and run well.”

He believes that he will have multiple chances to find victory lane before the season concludes, even with only five races remaining on the schedule.

“For me, there are a couple [races] I look forward to,” he said. “I think Kansas or Texas, those two are going to be our best two shots to win coming up through the end of the year. Those are two tracks that, for me and for JGR, have been really strong for us. We’ve run really well at both of those tracks.”

Jones has been arguably the best driver at those two 1.5-mile tracks since arriving at Joe Gibbs Racing, but he hasn’t yet found victory lane at either.

In 10 starts there, he has not finished outside of the top 10. At Kansas Speedway, he has recorded finishes of seventh, fourth, third, seventh and fifth place, and at Texas Motor Speedway, he has recorded finishes of fourth, fourth, fourth, 10th and sixth.

“So I’m excited for those two,” he added. “I feel like we can definitely contend and run up front and have a shot. That’s what we want to do; we want to win one of these races before the season ends. There’s no better feeling than just being the spoiler a little bit, I guess, in the playoffs, and hopefully at those tracks we can do that.”

No driver who was not in championship contention at the time of his win has won a playoff race since Matt Kenseth, who had been eliminated from the playoffs in the round of 12, won the round of 8 race at Phoenix Raceway in 2017. Jones replaced Kenseth after the 2020 season.

No non-playoff driver has won a playoff race since Denny Hamlin won the 2013 season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway.

Jones is coming off of a season-best second place finish at Talladega Superspeedway as he continues to seek his first win since he won at Darlington Raceway last September, which was now 42 races ago.

Jones has now recorded one second place finish in each of his first four seasons as a full-time Cup Series driver, and the disappointment of coming one spot away from the win doesn’t get any easier.

“I think every second place has a little bit of disappointment in it,” he explained. “You want to win any chance you get, and when you run second, you’re that close to getting the win.”

But this one wasn’t as hard to swallow as some of the others.

“I don’t know if that’s the toughest second place I’ve ever had,” he added. “Talladega is such a wild card, you don’t really know where you’re going to be running at the end of the day. I think my toughest second place was probably actually in my rookie year. I finished second at Bristol in the night race to Kyle Busch, and we had led I think over 300 laps in that race.

“We were really, really strong that day, and the track kind of changed and moved around. It moved up off the bottom and to the top. Our car wasn’t quite as good on the top as it was on the bottom, and Kyle was able to drive around us there with 20 or 30 laps left. So that’s probably the toughest second place I’ve ever had.”

With him out of this year’s title fight, he thinks Hamlin, now his teammate, will bring home his first title once the season finale at Phoenix Raceway rolls around in November.

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“I think there are two guys, obviously, that are the favorites, Kevin Harvick and Denny Hamlin,” he said. “Coming down to Phoenix, man, Kevin is going to be really strong, but honestly I think Denny is going to take it. He won that race in Phoenix last year when it wasn’t the last race but second to last, so obviously they’ve got a really good notebook to go from, and I think he feels pretty tough to beat come that race.”

The season finale is scheduled to take place on Sunday, November 8 and is set to be broadcast live on NBC beginning at 3:00 p.m. ET.

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