Toyota GAZOO Racing – Erik Jones
NASCAR Cup Series Quotes
DARLINGTON, S.C. (August 30, 2025) – LEGACY MOTOR CLUB driver Erik Jones was made available to the media on Saturday prior to practice for the NASCAR Cup Series race at Darlington Raceway.
ERIK JONES, No. 43 Dollar Tree Toyota Camry XSE, LEGACY MOTOR CLUB
What is your outlook looking into the weekend?
“Yeah, I always enjoy this race. I look forward to it every year, but I feel like we have a good car – been getting our stuff better on the mile-and-a-halves. We will see how it goes, but I look forward to this race every year and enjoy the weekend and enjoy the race tomorrow. It has been a fun one for me, so I’m excited to get it going.”
How will the cooler temperatures play into the race?
“Yeah, it will definitely – the track I feel like always goes free here as the night goes on. I don’t know if it will change it a whole lot. The tires – when it is colder like that – they don’t get as worn out and as slick, so the line changes quite a bit, I feel like, every year. With it being colder, it might make it go a little freer, especially as it gets cooler and cooler throughout the night. But definitely one of the colder late summer Southern 500’s I can remember in the last few years, so it will be a bit different, especially with lines and where you run with the tires just wearing a little bit less.”
Do you always come here confident that you can win here with the success that you’ve had?
“I feel like we have a shot to win when we come here. I feel like this is our best chance in a few years – our cars are getting better. The last couple of years, I don’t feel like we’ve had the cars that we’ve needed to contend, but this year, I feel like we will be a bit closer. This is a similar car to what we had in Indy, where we had a lot of speed, so I think that will transfer over a bit. I know it is a different track, but it will transfer some speed over. Definitely feel good about it. It is a hard one to win. Everything has to go really well. A lot of green flag stops. You can’t get caught in a yellow or a weird situation. A lot of things have to work out throughout the night to have opportunities but definitely have the confidence coming here knowing that I feel like I know how to run the race and knowing what I need from my car and know that if it is doing certain things that we will be able to contend. You don’t have that feeling every week. There are not always tracks that you are comfortable at or had a car that was good enough to contend, but here I definitely have that feeling.”
How do you approach practice knowing the race is in completely different conditions?
“Yeah, thankful that we are at least in group two, so there is a few more minutes to get some heat here and some rubber laid down. It is tough. I feel like practice for this race, specifically, is tough because it goes to night the way it does. There are a few things I look for my car to do. It will be tough with how cool it is today. It is going to drive good compared to what the race will be like. Hope, I can kind of search those things out. There is a couple of things that I like to look for in each end, that if it is doing well, I think it will have it race pretty well, so hopefully, we can kind of feel that out and get it close to that. Probably will just try to make one long run, see what our fall off is like. Even as cool as it is, you would be able to get a sense of how your car falls off after 10 or 20 laps, that will probably be the most important to us.”
What do you feel like you found to make the progress you’ve seen this season?
“Well, I mean, there were a lot of new people that came into LEGACY MOTOR CLUB in September, October of last year. It takes time to build out a new process, a new way of doing things. I feel like it just took that stretch to get everyone comfortable the way that we were building cars, probably get our cars mapped out to even know what cars are our best, and it is still kind of that work in progress, but you know, for us, we didn’t have any notebook. In ‘22, ’23, even ’24 – we were so far off, we really had no notes to go off of and really get better, so we’ve kind of really spent all of this year building that notebook and trying to work from it, and I would say that is where our short track and road course stuff has struggled because we don’t have good notes on it and we need to build that out. I think just the new process in place at the end of last year, we needed six months to get to that point to where it showed performance.”
Can you explain the plush toy on stage?
“Oscar, my dog, this is his plushie. We sell them at the merch trailer. We got them back in stock. We sold a few more than we thought right off the bat. It supports my foundation as part of the animal welfare side of things. All of the profits and proceeds go back to the foundation for the animal welfare portion, so back in stock this weekend, so if you get a chance to go to the merch trailer, we’ve got them back for you.”
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