I have to say JJ Yeley is one of the busiest race car drivers I have worked with between his NSCS schedule, being the driver of the #28 Dodge in the NNS series and various other racing venues, I can just imagine he has trouble finding the time to scratch his own nose. At any rate I spoke with him last week to get an update on the Nationwide races he has completed since the last time we spoke.
Following the Dover race, the last race of this Nationwide Series season thus far, JJ and the #28 JGL Dodge sit 17th in the NNS points. That is quite amazing considering this is a newly formed team, one actually formed in December of last year with JJ joining JGL Racing after the beginning of this season. To date they have no sponsorship for this team. I spoke with JJ last week while he was on the road.
“I’m just leaving the beach to drive back to Charlotte and then that leaves me 2 hours to get packed, run a couple of errands and then head to the airport to head to Pocono (Sprint Cup Pocono 400). I’m always somewhere doing something. Right now from a points stand we’re 17th. Things have been going pretty decent. We had a great finish at Talladega and then we’ve had little struggles here and there. We had what I thought was a pretty decent run for Iowa. We were a little setback just for the fact that I was at Charlotte Motor Speedway running the Sprint Show Down with the Cup car so I missed the entire Nationwide practice day on Friday and only had an hour practice on Saturday to try to really tune the car. That was a pretty big disadvantage compared to everyone that was able to practice Friday.”
“We ran on the lead lap pretty much all day long. We just finished our last run on some older tires that really hurt our performance. Moving forward from there we went to Charlotte and it looked like we had a really good run going there but ran into some issues with a green flag pit stop that cost me a stop and go penalty. What looked like an easy top 15 finish ended up turning into a 21st place finish. At the end of the day that still isn’t horrible but you hate to just give positions away voluntarily. We had some of the Cup pit crew guys making the changes on the car. That was great but there was just a little miscommunication between the fuel man and the jack man and he dropped the car a little too soon. That penalty cost us some.”
“Then this past week at Dover again I felt like we really had a good racecar. The car drove well and then we had a power steering line come loose from the power steering box and Dover is such a fast track with a high frequency of bumps. There’s so much load and I lost my power steering so unfortunately I had to make a green flag pit stop. We lost a number of laps getting power steering fluid back in the car and getting the line tight and getting back on the track. Again it looked like we had a top 15 car going and ended up mired back in the 28th position numerous laps down.”
“We’ve had some mistakes the last couple of weeks that have cost us a good 15 to 20 points. To see that we’ve lost a couple of points positions and points on some of the teams we were gaining on, we talked about it from a team standpoint with owner James Whitener and crew chief Steve Platenberger to make sure we are all on board with our goals. We’ve got some road courses ahead of us that I’m really looking forward to and we are heading into a 18 race stretch so it’s going to take a lot of focus from everyone. We’re asking a lot from these guys. There are only 6 or 7 guys at the shop so this is going to be a 7 days a week operation. I know they all want to run good just like I do.”
“Running back and forth between my Cup car and my Nationwide car is part of the excitement. I like being a part of this team. We’re an underdog team, obviously, and we’re asking a lot from each other. Sometimes we’ll have some mistakes but as long as we remain positive and re-enforce our goals of finishing in the top 15 on a weekly basis we can achieve our goals every week, if we’re smart about it. Of course we only have some associate sponsors from week to week and that buys, maybe, a few sets of tires but if you look at it, we are running as well as some teams with major sponsorship and with Cup affiliation. I love racing. That’s my love after my family and the more time I can sit behind the wheel of a racecar, regardless of what kind of racecar it is, that’s what I want to do.”
It’s obvious JJ has confidence in this team. As race fans perhaps we should throw a little of our own confidence and excitement their way. Next stop for JGL Racing and JJ is the Ollie’s Bargain Outlet 250 at Michigan on June 14 and then on to the Gardner Denver 200 Fired Up By Johnsonville at Road America on June 21st. We wish them the best.
Any company that wants to benefit from the exposure of this rolling billboard can contact team owner James Whitener at [email protected] or [email protected]
And be sure to follow JJ on Facebook or Twitter and on his official website http://www.jjyeley.com/ . There you can find fan club information and updated racing info.
