Erik Jones, No. 43 Guns N’ Roses Camaro ZL1
Jones on the accident that ended his race early:
“It was hard to tell. It looked like the No. 45 (Tyler Reddick) got turned around, but I couldn’t see how it happened. Regardless, we spun out there on the bottom when I was trying to get around it and then I got hit on the left side hard enough to take out the left rear and end our day.
It is what it is. We were up there; we were racing and we were doing all we could. We were just in the wrong spot at the wrong time. I wish we could have been a little ahead of him.”
Are you surprised the first on-track came at the end of Stage Two?
“No, not really. Everybody was racing hard, but everybody was doing a good job of just keeping in line and doing what they needed to do. There were a couple of moments.. a couple of aggressive and bad pushes, but nothing that was too crazy. I don’t know what sprung that one off, but I thought everybody was doing a good job at that point. It started to get pretty aggressive up until that wreck and I was getting antsy about being up there and getting into something. We were kind of in a bad spot in the pack to get caught up in something. But yeah, I wasn’t surprised it took that long.”
Obviously, it’s a superspeedway, so there’s not a ton you can take from this weekend. But what did you learn this weekend that you can apply for when we get to either Atlanta (Motor Speedway) or Talladega (Superspeedway) later on?
“I thought our No. 43 Guns N’ Roses Chevy was good, it just needed some more speed. We had it driving pretty good, but just didn’t have it quite fast enough. I was having to carry a lot of throttle for too long to stay up and be aggressive with the pack with the pushes the way I wanted to, so we need to get a little more speed out of it moving forward. Hopefully we can find a way to do that.”
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