Over a sample size of eight races, Erik Jones has been the equivalent of a NASCAR Cup Series playoff contender, a reflection of all the changes at Legacy Motor Club over the past year.
They’re finally starting to put it together at the No. 43 team. Since the 11th race of the season, at Talladega, Jones has put together an 12.875 average finish with two top-5s and avoiding the kind of days that had them running outside the top-25 for much of the past calendar year.
To wit, Jones has climbed from 30th in the standings to 15th but is still 39 points out of a playoff spot due to some winners deeper in the standings like Josh Berry and Shane Van Gisbergen but there is a lot to like with how they are running right now.
“Yeah, I mean we’re kind of in a tough spot, right? We’re 39 points out of the Playoffs which is kind of eight really good races,” Jones said. “Obviously, a win would be great, but I feel like there’s a couple of tracks we really have to target hard on what places we can win at. For us, I mean, it’s just doing what we’re doing. If we keep running the way we’ve ran since Charlotte, we’ll yeah we’ll probably point our way in barring another kind of obscure winner farther back in points.
“So, that’s the plan right now is just to keep running well and keep racking these points up. I hope it goes well again this weekend. Kind of three strange weeks: here (Chicago), Sonoma and Dover, so it’s going to kind of make-or-break us. You know, one bad race, (pause) if we have a race where something goes wrong, we don’t score any good points, I mean it’s kind of over unless a lot of other people have bad races too. We’ve been on a great roll, tons of momentum. It’s easy to look at it right now and say it’s going to keep going, but you don’t know how things ebb and flow. Pointing our way in is the number one goal, but we’re banking hard on a couple of races that we can win too.”
But regardless of the end result, Jones and Legacy have something to build on and it’s rewarding for an organization that turned over its entire competition department over the past calendar year. The improvement since the arrival of Jacob Cantor as director of competition and Brian Campe as technical director are uncanny.
“There just wasn’t a lot of leadership in those roles and we didn’t have a good engineering flow from the top, down,” Jones said. “So there was some processes that needed to be built out and people understanding what their roles were and what they needed to be doing, what they needed to focus on, what they didn’t need to focus on. It took a solid six-to-eight months probably to break that down and then beyond that, just hiring more people, right?
“We were pretty short-staffed in our engineering department, even after hiring those guys. It took all that time to really get everybody in their right position and figuring out what they were going to be doing. Now, I feel like everybody’s really in the flow of it and (there’s) a lot more open communication between everybody just knowing what’s going on, who’s working on what, given enough forum for guys to come up with new ideas and figure things out. It just took some organization. There was just a stretch where we didn’t have the leadership in place and now, I feel like our leadership group is really strong.”
Jones said Legacy has made up the biggest gap it has needed to, in going from a 30th place organization to one that routinely runs in the top-10 but that it’s still harder to find what the perpetual frontrunners have.
“We’re in the magic zone, right,” Jones said. “So, in racing, I think if you’re running 30th, like we were last year, it’s not easy to get better to run in the top-15 or top-10, but it’s a lot easier to get to that point than it is to go from top-10 to top-5 to winning.
“So, this is kind of where that magic starts to happen and it takes some really good people to find some really minute things in race cars, and then it comes down to the drivers as well, right? And execution, making it happen in the seat, so yeah, I wish I could just tell you what that is.”
He said he and teammate John Hunter Nemechek are ‘a step away’ from being there with Penske, Gibbs and Hendrick.
“We’re real close to that mark, but it definitely takes some magic,” Jones said. “And it’s like that in all levels of racing. It always has been for me at least, you can easily pick up … if you’re a half-second off that first three-and-a-half, four tenths, is easy. That last tenth is pretty hard to find. So that’s kind of where we’re sitting right now, but it’s going to take both sides from the race car and from the garage.”
