TOYOTA RACING – Erik Jones
NASCAR Cup Series Quotes
SONOMA, Calif. (June 27, 2026) – LEGACY MOTOR CLUB driver Erik Jones was made available to the media on Saturday prior to the NASCAR Cup Series race from Sonoma Raceway.
ERIK JONES, No. 43 Dollar Tree Toyota Camry XSE, LEGACY MOTOR CLUB
You’ve completed all but nine laps this season. You’ve completed the third most of all the drivers in the Cup series. How important is it to have clean races?
“Yeah, I mean, it’s important. I think you’ve seen the last month just with our group. We’ve had some good days in there too, but we’ve not had any real bad ones, and that’s what’s kind of leap frogged us here in points pretty far up the standings so far is that a lot of guys have just had bad days, even Shane (van Gisbergen) last week getting wrecked in San Diego, Preece just having a few bad weeks. Just the guys that were racing around have had struggles, and so, for me, I think, it’s a mentality thing. I feel like I’ve been in just a good spot of being able to take what I can get on whatever day it is and whether that’s a day like Michigan contending for the win or a day like San Diego, just trying to run top 20, we’re just taking what we can get and making the most of it. So, yeah, it’s super important. I didn’t know that statistic, to be honest with you this season, but I feel like it’s been a clean year. We haven’t made a lot of mistakes, on either end, on my end or on the team’s end and the times that we have, we’ve been able to kind of clean it up and salvage day out of it. So, yeah, I’m proud of that for sure. I think that’s something to be proud of and it’s shown that here in our points position and hopefully we can just keep that going a handful a bit longer.”
Can you tell us about all the new owners coming in your side, and how does that hype the team up and give you more visibility?
“Yeah, I think Jimmie (Johnson) has a vision for what he sees LEGACY becoming as a team and some of that involves the celebrity investment we’ve seen over the last couple of months, and I think there’s more to come on that side. So, It’s been fun to see. It’s fun to get eyes on the sport, people involved. These are people who I think they’re probably more time race fans, and now they’re just getting a chance to really get up close and personal with it a little bit. So yeah, I enjoy it. It’ll be fun to have them come out to the track and obviously we had Darius (Rucker) out in Nashville and this weekend, I believe, I think Guy’s (Fieri) making a stop at the track this weekend. So, that’s going be pretty neat, and it’s all at a nice time for us as a company. We’re running well and doing things well on the racing side, so getting the off-track stuff on a comparable level with it, I think is going to be just as important here going forward.”
Are you aware of the barriers they have put in?
“I think something they’ve been kind of developing. I’m assuming you’re talking about turn 11 and we put up some traditional style walls the last couple of years with the tire packs. They were just getting pretty much ran over most of the race and they would get pushed back and that corner would change a bunch as you went through the day. So just getting it to stay the same and having a true barrier, we’re a little bit unique in our sport in the Cup series that we don’t have what you would think of as a traditional track limits as some guys do. So, you’ve kind of got to protect us from ourselves a little bit and having a giant wall, I guess, eliminates that option of doing anything else. So, I don’t think it’ll change racing a whole lot. You don’t want to see a mess down there. Somebody gets wrecked and it’s pretty narrow now with those walls, but I don’t think it’s going to change things a whole bunch.”
Does it excite you going into next week at Chicagoland?
“Yeah, I’m looking forward to it. I mean, obviously, we’ve got to get through here and have a decent day tomorrow. I’ll be honest with these two weeks. I was not super excited about between San Diego and Sonoma. We were having a great stretch there of races and the road courses haven’t been great for us. So, we’ve done a good job getting through one. We got to get through one more tomorrow., and then Chicago, I think, is a place we’re all looking forward to.
When we went there years ago, I felt like I ran good there as a driver and I think for us just as a team where we’re at and where we run well, a track like Chicago with a lot of character and roughness and high wear, I think will be good for us. I hope it is, and also having a practice there, I think, is good for us having a real practice session as a as a two-car team is a big deal. So, there’s a lot of things that, we could go and say we’re going to perform well. I hope to get out of here with a decent day tomorrow and just be in a spot here for this next stretch of eight races on from Chicago to have a good shot trying to get in the Playoffs.”
How do you kind of prepare to kind of counteract what’s been happening on road courses coming into Sonoma this weekend?
“We’ve put a ton of work in between us as drivers, myself and John Hunter (Nemechek), and on the team, on the cars, trying to improve. We took a big swing at San Diego, and I think we missed a little bit, but we were able to make some changes overnight from Friday and Saturday and get it better. Here at Sonoma is a bit more typical of a road course, obviously, and we have a bit bigger notebook to go off of, and I think we’ll hopefully have ended a bit closer here this afternoon, but I think for me, I’ve done as much work as I can, as just trying to improve as a driver and focus what I can focus on. The Next Gen car on the road course has been extremely different than what the Gen 6 car was, and for me, it’s still been an adjustment period of trying to get better, and I think you’ve seen a handful of guys that have struggled with it and haven’t quite hit on it yet. There’s been days where it’s been better, but not consistently. So, all I can do, though, is the work I’ve done and put it in and try to get better on my end and hope that this afternoon when we unload, it’s going to show.
Your spotter, Will Rodgers, is going to be racing today. Did he call you last night with some tips or how does that just kind of help you across the weekend?
“Yeah, we chat a bit about him running here. He got to run here last year, and so that was cool, and Will’s (Rodgers) is a great road racer. He won a race here in, at the time, I think it was called the K&N Series that I was actually running and I finished fifth or sixth and he won the race by, I don’t know, 10, 15 seconds. So, he excels on these places. I know he loves getting in the race car when he can, and he had an opportunity, a little bit earlier this year, Watkins Glen, with that group, and they had a decent day, and hopefully he has just another good day today. I would love to see him get up around, top 15 in a top 10 would be amazing for that group and that team. So, it’s fun to see. Fun to watch him get in there and do it, and I know, like I said, he really enjoys it and it’d be fun to watch him this afternoon.”
You said the goal coming into this weekend was just to have a good day. So, what exactly does that look like? Also, what type of preparation were you guys even able to do for this track with it being sandwiched in between two relatively unknown racetracks?
“Yeah, it’s been tough. I would say we probably didn’t get to do as much preparation as we wanted for Sonoma. We focused really heavily on San Diego with it being unknown, and then most of us, all of us, really stayed out here, this last week to come here to Sonoma. So, there wasn’t as much as we got to put into it other than just film and notes and trying to remember everything. Fortunately, we’ve been here a bunch. So that helps out. It’s a little easier to go out to somewhere you’ve been a bunch, but, I think a good day for us, I would say if we could steal some stage points, that’d be great. Some of these guys flipping the stage and we can stay on grab some points, it would be awesome. But if we could come out of here with that and a top 15, I think that’d be great. I think San Diego was to keep the car clean, come home top-20. We’d hit that kind of on the button. I wish it was a little bit better than that, but we did, and then this week, I think our expectations are a bit higher. Just having more experience here, a bigger notebook, and what we believe we can do. So, yeah, some stage points and a top 15, I think would be a great day for us.
Can you talk about the sunscreen sampling that your foundation is doing here this weekend?
“Yeah, so real quick, the Erik Jones Foundation is out here this weekend, Dollar Tree, donated a ton of sunscreen samples to us. So actually, we’re out in the fan zone right now passing out samples. We were in the campground yesterday handing out samples. So, it’s been fun. It’s spreading the skin cancer awareness and learning more about that, sharing that with the garage and the fans and you’re sitting out in the sun all day when you’re watching one of these races and just being able to hand out some sunscreen samples and keep everybody safe has been a great effort from us from the foundation and just happy to have Dollar Tree jumping in and support too. They donated a bunch of sunscreen for this weekend, and it’s cool to see them taking on some work with the foundation, helping us out.”
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