Erik Jones: Pointing Into Playoffs 'Number One Goal' for No. 43 Team

LEGACY MOTOR CLUB, in the last eight to ten weeks, has been up on the wheel and putting together an astonishing turnaround in the NASCAR Cup Series, with drivers John Hunter Nemechek and Erik Jones putting together fantastic results that has sent the organization’s stock trending upwards.

Since the May 4 event at Texas Motor Speedway (eight races ago), Nemechek has placed his No. 42 Toyota Camry XSE inside the top-10 four times, while Jones has managed to put himself inside the top-five twice (Texas and Atlanta), with three top-10s and five top-15s.

Those stellar performances have done wonders when it comes to the points positions for LEGACY MOTOR CLUB’s two full-time drivers at the halfway point of the season, with Nemechek leaping from 27th to 23rd in standings, and Jones making a remarkable 14-spot jump from 30th into a tie for 15th with Austin Cindric.

“We’ve been on a great roll, tons of momentum.” Jones said. “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.”

Jones has been the most consistent of the organization’s two drivers, having not finished worse than 17th-place since Kansas Speedway in May. Those results, among the chaos of the always-changing NASCAR Cup Series playoff picture, has put the No. 43 into outside contention for a spot.

Entering Sunday’s Grant Park 165 at the Chicago Street Course, Jones sits 18th on the Playoff Grid, 49 points below the cutline. It’s likely to be a difficult road ahead if the LEGACY MOTOR CLUB team wants to make the post-season (especially without scoring a victory), but should the No. 43 continue to run the way they have been, squeaking in on points might not be out of the question if everything goes right.

“We’re kind of in a tough spot, right? We’re [49 points] out of the Playoffs which is kind of eight really good races. 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,” Jones said on Friday. “For us, it’s just doing what we’re doing. If we keep running that way we’ve run since Charlotte, yeah, we’ll probably point our way in barring another kind of obscure winner farther back in points.”

“That’s the plan, right now, is just to keep running well and keep racking these points up,” he added. “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 – if we have a race where something goes wrong, don’t score any good points, I mean it’s kind of over unless a lot of other people have bad races too.”

The next eight weeks consist of some interesting racetracks for Jones and LEGACY MOTOR CLUB, including three road courses (Chicago, Sonoma, and Watkins Glen), as well as a superspeedway of Daytona International Speedway, a track where LEGACY had success in February.

Likely the biggest obstacle for Jones and LEGACY MOTOR CLUB will be the road courses, a place where both teams have struggled immensely in the past, and a track type where Jones hasn’t been the best when it comes to the NextGen car.

The last time Jones earned a top-10 finish on a road course was in 2022, when he finished 10th at Watkins Glen. That same year, he also finished inside the top-10 at Circuit of The Americas, those being his only two top-10s on road courses in the seventh-generation car.

The bright side, though? Jones’ teammate, John Hunter Nemechek, put together a sixth-place run at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez last month for LEGACY MOTOR CLUB, showing that the team does have some strength when it comes to the road courses.

“They’re [road courses] not our strength from any sense of that, but I think it’s better,” Jones added asked about the team’s road course package. “Mexico went a lot better for us. It felt like we had a good car, strategy kind of derailed us, but the No. 42 had a great finish. We still earned a bunch of points running up front a lot of the day, but I think we took a big step forward there.”

“Circuit of The Americas (COTA) earlier this year, we were legitimately a last-place car almost, so to take that step forward, I think was impressive, but it’s one sample size. Think we’ll know a lot better after Sunday and Sonoma where we really stand.”

As is always the case on the road courses, strategy will play a major role in who is awarded stage points in Sunday’s event. Jones and crew chief Ben Beshore will no doubt be looking for maximum points for the No. 43 AdventHealth Toyota Camry to try and get closer to the post-season cutoff.

The Grant Park 165 will take place Sunday, July 6 at 3:30 PM ET on TNT, MRN, and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.

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