Toyota Racing – Brandon Jones
NASCAR Xfinity Series Quotes
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (February 14, 2020) – Joe Gibbs Racing driver Brandon Jones was made available to media at Daytona International Speedway:
BRANDON JONES, No.19 Interstate Batteries Toyota Supra, Joe Gibbs Racing
How was practice?
“It was good, man. Fun to get back. Kind of in the draft a little bit, practicing some. (Justin) Allgaier side drafted me pretty big and I went back up to try to pull that off a little bit and for the one’s watching on TV and saw it, it looked like I got into him. I went over there after practice and hugged him and I was like ‘man, that was close.’ He almost said that he didn’t even think I touched him. It was almost like the air – a bubble of air just kind of tacked on his car and that’s what kind of cause a little bit of that. Wind was pretty strong today. That was a little bit of a factor that played into it. I think Jeff Meendering (crew chief) had things he just wanted to try physically on the car. Things that really – doesn’t really affect myself. He was just kind of looking for some speed here and there in the car. That was more than we’ve done in the past. We’re definitely taking the superspeedway program pretty serious now.”
You were drafting and not just doing single-car runs and things like that?
“Absolutely. This year especially, I put a lot of time into kind of going back and studying that some. Watching some fast races and you see (Tyler) Reddick doing it so well and I always thought in the past in practice that – I’m like Reddick is going to wreck the field doing this, but what you saw was him putting himself in race position moves and he was really aggressive on those side drafts and at the end of the race he knew what he needed to do to win the thing. That was some stuff that I picked up on and I was trying get in practice today. Also things like keeping your car poked out to see how the runs were getting – things like that. I played around with that a bunch and I think I’ve got a decent idea now of what we need to do.”
Do you feel like you need to be more aggressive out there when you’re racing?
“For sure. There’s a lot of times you hear guys, especially rookies coming into these races saying they just want to paint that bottom line – they just want to stay on that bottom and I just don’t think that’s how you win the race. That’s how you be a consistent finisher and maybe get a top five, top 10 out of the deal, but if you want to win the thing, you’ve got to try to make those last minute moves and pull out and try to suck those guys back side-drafting. It’s tough now because we have so many good cars out there racing that almost no one wants to go with you anymore. You have to figure out how to do it yourself. You have to figure out how to leap-frog those cars and start working side draft really aggressive.”
As far as the season goes, do you feel like this might be your year?
“It is. I’ve put my goals together already this year and I’ll go ahead and say them. I think five wins is pretty reasonable and looking at 15 top fives and try to – 25 top 10s. Obviously things are going to happen. You’re going to have some DNFs here and there. You can’t control some of the stuff that happens, but looking at the tracks and the schedule, I don’t think there’s one that we run out of the top 10 on all year long. I know those are pretty high compared to what we’ve seen in the past, but looking at the way we ran last year, looking at our speed, I see it being very reasonable.”
Do you see the championship field as fairly wide open given that everybody that’s graduated from the class of last year?
“I’ll be interested to see, by the way, how our Big Four do up in the next series. That’s going to kind of be something eye-opening for me too. That’s my goal. We all want to try to get to the Cup Series. If they do really well here and they do really well when they move up, that’s obviously something to keep in mind. I’ll be curious. I think that this year we’ll be in the Big Four. We’re going to be one of the guys that are going to be in the next group and we’re going to collect some wins and turn some heads.”
Who are the other three?
“I’ll have to see how the year plays out this year. We’ve got some veterans still. We can’t keep those guys out of the loop. (Daniel) Hemric, obviously coming back after some Cup experience, that’ll be pretty big. (Justin) Allgaier, our other two (Joe) Gibbs (Racing) guys are going to be strong too I feel like. I watched Riley (Herbst) and Harrison (Burton) run a bunch and they’re going to have some good knowledge and good cars to compete.”
What do you expect in the Xfinity race in general?
“Based off what I saw in practice, guys were kind of making some moves. We saw two lanes forming a little bit. A lot of guys leaving the bottom. Nobody really could kind of break that air bubble. I saw a couple guys extremely aggressive on the side draft. Hopefully we’re not collecting anything. I know that there’s a risk of coming here. You always – you try to miss that big one. That’s where the luck, per say, comes in, but it’s no luck to run good at these tracks. I can go and look at stats with everyone and show you who runs good at these tracks and it’s the same people. All the same time.”
Is there a sense of relief when you get past this weekend and head to Las Vegas?
“It is. You get to Vegas and now, you know now we’ll work on the car, now we’re getting the thing right. This track, there’s still a bunch of skill, but it’s all on the driver. There’s a lot of stuff that you just have to come up and figure out. The crew chief can help you a little bit with some strategy, but there’s not a bunch that he can do.”
How does it feel being the senior driver at Joe Gibbs Racing?
“It’s kind of a weird role. I’m all of a sudden getting asked some questions about some guys, which is cool. I’m always looking for the next challenge. The biggest thing is making sure everyone kind of knows what they’ve got to do and making sure that my other two teammates, especially, can come and talk to me about life situations or race situations or whatever. I’m going to give them an easy, honest answer.”
How do you feel going back to Indianapolis this year with it being a road course? A bit of a surprise, right?
“It was. I just got that track figured out too. We had a lot of speed there last year. Go figure, right? I thought I had the car to win the race if we were to put it all together, but we’ve been doing a lot of road course prep. This is turning into a lot of road course races here and we’re doing things – traveling overseas and going to different schools and doing stuff abroad too. There’s a bunch going into prepping for this stuff now.”
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