DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Without a peep regarding his contract talks with Joe Gibbs Racing for next season and beyond, Erik Jones returns to Daytona (Fla.) International Speedway focused on earning his second career Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series win in Saturday night’s Coke Zero Sugar 400.
Jones survived a crazy and chaotic Daytona summer shootout to put the No. 20 Toyota Camry back in Victory Circle. Since then – Jones has achieved 11 top-five finishes and finished second last fall at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, but with the pressure on to perform, Jones feels perhaps his great opportunity to divert chatter about his future is putting himself back in Victory Lane.
“Coming back as the defending winner always feels good,” said Jones. “For me, it gives you that extra little bump to keep being the defending winner and to come back and do it again.”
The Byron, Mich. native knows in order to finish first on Saturday night, he’ll have to fight through the manufacturer fight and the pairings of the Ford and Chevrolet teams working together where February’s Daytona 500 and April’s Cup race at Talladega ultimately proved to produce that strength was better in numbers.
With just five Toyota teams entered for Saturday night, the four Joe Gibbs Racing cars of Jones, Kyle Busch, Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr. and the affiliated car of Matt DiBenedetto, Jones hopes to be apart of the train that breaks up the caboose.
“We were talking about it just the other day as a group,” Jones mentioned. “We’ve got some strong racecars. Unfortunately, there is only five Toyotas out there and that doesn’t give us a lot to work with, especially with the other manufacturers having more,” explained Jones.
“We will do all we can; I know we will have fast cars but it’s definitely going to be manufacturer driven with the other two linking up and sticking together.
“I think they saw what Toyota has done in the past, well before I was racing in Cup with working together and making sure they were in the place that they needed to be.”
With the current superspeedway package being introduced for the first time at Daytona’s 2.5-mile superspeedway, Jones says you’ll see different racing and strategy compared to February.
“I felt like at Talladega we were trying to tag on with some of the other guys and tag on to their lines because they were so much bigger than ours. Just trying to make the most of what we had. Coming back here, the racing will be different here than what it was at Talladega. I think everybody has time to work on this package and optimize it,” he added.
“Daytona is a lot different track than Talladega,” he added. “I don’t know. It will be definitely interesting to see. It’s definitely going to be a little tougher for some of the manufacturers to take advantage of the alliance with it being so narrow. There is not, sometimes, anywhere to go at Daytona. I think that plays into our hand a little bit.
While the alliances proved to work better at Talladega than Daytona, Jones believes if he can get his car out front – he will have the opportunity to control the race.
“If we can get out front, we can command the race and get that line rolling around the top they Toyotas will be strong up there. I think this race plays better in our hand with having less cars. It’s easy to say now. I will tell you more about 10 pm on Saturday night. Going into it, I would say we all feel a little better about it.”
Follow Chris Knight on Twitter @Knighter01.
