TOYOTA RACING – Brandon Jones
NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series Quotes
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (August 28, 2026) – Joe Gibbs Racing driver Brandon Jones was made available to the media on Friday prior to the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series race from Daytona International Speedway.
BRANDON JONES, No. 20 Menards/Sylvania Toyota GR Supra, Joe Gibbs Racing
What has it been like this year going back to Joe Gibbs Racing and Toyota?
“It was funny – a little quick story about going back to JGR (Joe Gibbs Racing) from a couple years off was I still mostly knew the majority of the people that still work there and the employees there. Everyone that sets up the interiors of the race car and when I was coming back, I said, ‘hey, do you still have my old seat insert, all the seat rails?” They said yeah. I said put them all back out and let’s see if it all works, and everything was perfect. I didn’t have to change a thing. I was like, “this is great.” So, yeah, I just integrate with this group, I think, really well. I mean, I’ve certainly been to different organizations, different race teams, different manufacturers through my career, and I just, man, I just continue to gravitate towards this Toyota development program, and this Joe Gibbs Racing team. I think everything about it, for me, just makes sense. I mean, it’s just the place that we’ve got a lot of comfort at and got a lot of speed at on a consistent basis. Everybody’s really bought in on the 20 group. So, yeah, it’s been a really, honestly, an easy transition back. Like I said, there’s still so many familiar faces. The crew chief lineup had changed quite a bit since I had left for a few years, you know, coming back into it. But Sam McAulay now is a couple years in with myself, and prior to me getting there, he had a lot of success with Sheldon (Creed), and they were on the cusp of so many wins, but came up short so many times, so it was, it was cool to become the driver to kind of help him get his wins, as well as a crew chief. So, yeah, we’ve been doing a great job, and it seems like year after year after year, working with Sam now, it’s like we just continue to build on what we started and get better and better. So, it’s been a nice, easy, seamless transition for sure. And somewhere I just want to try to almost become a home base at, I think, you know, at JGR. It’s a place that I strived to be at when I was a really young racer growing up, and so it’s just cool to see how it all kind of came full circle for me.”
How have you continued to tackle road courses over the years and where do you benchmark yourself right now?
“I’ve made big strides on road courses, and it’s probably a regret of mine of just not doing much of it growing up. When I looked at, I was 13 whenever I first started driving anything, right? So, I looked at what, or we did as a team, looked at what was the majority of the season, and it’s still the majority of the season is oval racing, but it’s such an important chunk now is road racing, and I just didn’t do any of that stuff growing up. I feel like I’m still on the edge of trying to kind of play catch up, but honestly, we’re, I mean, at my best days on road courses, we’re in the top 5 of the season regulars, right? I’m not a Connor Zilisch, not an SVG, by any means, at road courses, but I’ve also kind of came to figure out, you don’t have to be, right? It’s more about minimizing the losses on those kinds of days. You look at the schedule and even look at the schedule that just came out for next year, it’s still not really the majority of the year. I think we’ve got it down to four or so now, which is great. I think that it’s cool to have them thrown in there a little bit. But at the same time, this is an oval car, right? I think it’s still does the best job at an oval track. So, those are the things that I still enjoy the most, but yeah, it’s a balance about how do you figure out how to go do it because, unfortunately, you don’t just take this car anymore and say, well, we’re gonna go down to VIR or somewhere, and we’re gonna wear it out all day, and we’re gonna test, and you’re gonna drive off the track until you figure it out. It’s like, you have to play the game to go figure it out anymore. I’ve done certain series – Trans Am. I mean, we’ve all probably integrated ourselves somehow into the Trans Am series, and I’ve done multiple races in that car, but it’s still tough. Our season’s long, and those races are conflicting typically with ours, you know? So, it’s a balance to go figure out how to go get more laps, and it’s almost like golf swing, in my opinion. If you go practice golf, and you have a terrible swing, and you just keep practicing the terrible swing, well, that’s not really a great use of your time either. So how do you go make that productive? It’s a constant battle, and I tell all my young guys that are starting to get into the sport, and wanting to get to this level, you gotta start mixing your stuff in with some road course racing.”
Is it a tough situation knowing you’re clinched in the Chase and knowing your other teammates are battling for the final spots?
“Well, yeah, I mean, what’s difficult is how do I help them? What do I do to try to do something to get them in? And I don’t know the answer to that. I mean, it’s interesting. It’s not a JGR issue. It’s not a really any issue, but it just seems like the Toyota cars, the way that the bodies are made or something about it. If you put us all four in a line, we just aren’t really that strong compared to like maybe necessarily the Chevrolets. So, really, we don’t really do ourselves much favors aligning ourselves. We’ve talked as an organization, and we’ve basically gone over all the scenarios of, like, what can we do to help each other? And we honestly feel like we’re hurting each other when we all four jump in a line. And I think most people know that too in the series. I mean, you see it pretty regularly. If we’re all in a line, a Chevy’s gonna just dump us fast. They’re just gonna lead the lane quick, and they’re gonna try to go around us. So, our best battle honestly is to align ourselves with who we feel is gonna have some of the best speed in the race. Our guys are doing a great job. I mean, they’re trying to go to work on figuring these superspeedways out, but I don’t think it’s any secret that this isn’t our absolute strongest point of the tracks that we go to. There’s other race tracks that Joe Gibbs Racing shines at compared to other places, but this is a point where we’re trying to get better at as a team. So, trust me, we have a game plan on what we can try to do, but at the end of the day, I think things like letting them up in line, if they ever get hung out right, you can be the guy that kind of drags the lane back and you can allow those cars to not go from third all way back to 30th. You can allow them to kind of jump in front of you, but there are just certain things that, man, sorry, you know, it’s just gonna be one of those days that you’re gonna have to figure it out. It does seem like if you try to go out of your way too, then you end up just hurting, like I said, the both of you. So yeah, we’re playing that strategy, I think, this afternoon.”
Why do you think all of your career wins have come with Joe Gibbs Racing?
“I do think there is something about the way that the car handles just slightly different than the other cars that I’ve kind of maybe raced around in. Now, the RCR days, I don’t have a great fair read on. I mean, I was so young at that time, and I didn’t have anybody really helping me on the development side. I didn’t have anybody to help me prepare for races, and I didn’t know how to take notes after the races. I was just going, like I was Late Model racing week to week, and just kind of experiencing it all at once. But now, I’ve got a lot of knowledge about how to make a car go fast and how to properly race around guys. So, I don’t give that time of my career, a really fair assessment. But I will say that this car at Joe Gibbs racing fits my style better. I’m a guy that I do not like the rear grip to be low. Some guys, you look at the dirt racers, for example, they love to have the car moving around a bunch in the back end and they don’t mind it slipping around. I’m somebody that wants that tied down and secured a lot more. This car, for some reason, just makes a lot of speed doing that. I have found that this car fits my style of driving, maybe slightly better than anything that I’ve ever been in, but it’s also the most consistent organization that I’ve ever been at. We do almost all the little things correct, and I think that that really helps the end result more than anything about just having fast pit stops all day long and just executing the day just a little bit better than the places I’ve been.”
Knowing you’ve never made a Cup Series start, is that something you aspire to do and have you ever talked to Joe Gibbs Racing about that?
“That’s certainly the way if you want to go Cup racing to do it. I think that the path that I’ve taken here currently about driving this car for this many years, and then, all of a sudden, a year later, trying to make a Cup series basically run at it would be very eye-opening, very difficult to go do, because everything that I think I’ve learned on this car and how to drive it, everything I hear, it kind of goes out the window and you’ve got to recalibrate. And so, yeah, if you’re gonna go drive one, I think that spending some time here, a year or two, but then, as you mentioned, mixing the races in is absolutely best-case scenario, and I’ve just not had the opportunities. I’ve always had a chance to drive really good O’Reilly Auto Parts cars, and I find success here, and we’re capable of winning almost every race we go into here. There’s a lot of comfort, and a lot of, I guess, confidence. So, when I get in these race cars and just haven’t found the opportunity to go drive a Cup car yet. There’s certainly been conversations, but they’re just kind of hearsay, right, talk it here and there about, would you even want to go do it? And I tossed that idea out a bunch back and forth, and there’s a massive list of pros and a massive list of cons to go drive that car currently. Maybe when the time gets here and we have opportunities, I’m not gonna ever, ever X that out of my life or that chapter out, but currently we’re focused on driving this car to the best we can and still winning the championship. I’ve been doing it long enough now I want to be the top when we get to Homestead. I want to be in the mix. Win a championship, man, things change in your career. You continue to win races, and you’re always a talk at the end then people are going to want you in their car. So that’s gonna be my focus, and we’ll just kind of let the results hopefully pan out one day, and we’ll see when that gets here.”
How do you feel about the 20 team’s chances in the Chase this year?
“The tracks and the chase are phenomenal for us. The last couple weeks, I knew they were gonna be hit or miss. Like, it was one of those that they all could go really great — the last couple four races that we’ve been a part of – or they could all be kind of mediocre. And luckily, we haven’t had great races, but luckily the people we’ve been fighting haven’t really had great races either. The 2 (Jesse Love), the 17 (Corey Day), the 21 (Austin Hill). I mean, a lot of these guys haven’t had good weeks the last couple weeks and just, unfortunately, neither have we. I was really hoping – these have been great races to have capitalized on, but just circumstantially, one little thing currently happens. If you have a pit road mistake or restart mistake, slightly off on your balance a little bit, it’s just hard to ever recover from those little, tiny things. And I think that it just shows where the series is at right now as far as competitiveness. I mean, you get off a little bit, then the guy that never gets off is gonna win the race ultimately. We’ve just gotta minimize that a little bit. I look at the tracks, and we start at Darlington, and we know how good we are at Darlington. We also know how good the 7 (Justin Allgaier) car is there, but I feel like our consistency is gonna really prevail once we get there. We’re really close right now to having days where we’re just knocking out tons of top fives and even possibly closing out a couple wins. And so, Talladega is still thrown in the mix. There’s still a couple wild cards, for sure, to have to be challenged and gone through, but we took a couple of these off weeks here that we’ve had to sit down and assess the tracks that we feel are just slightly off for us, and we’ve been going to work, and so I think we’ve came up with some good setup stuff, and I’m excited to be testing that here coming soon.”
Do you feel like there’s a stigma for some of you drivers who have been in the O’Reilly Series for so long that maybe you’re not getting those Cup opportunities like the younger drivers?
“Possibly. Yeah, I don’t know for sure. I’ve never been ever approached by any teams and have been told that by any teams, but there could be something to that. I would hope there’s also, on the flip side of that, teams that would want me due to the fact that I have driven this car for so many years, right? I think that is a benefit to these O’Reilly organizations that have teams at this level, because it is somewhat still of development, I guess, series. They’re all trying to be technically developed to go to Cup. I think they want somebody in there that’s always constantly giving them reports on how their cars are truly, truly acting. And I’ve got a, you know, 12 years of knowledge now of, like, this is how they should feel when they win, and this is how they don’t feel when they win. And so, I feel like I give good insight to the race teams at that aspect. It’s maybe a slight hurt to try to go to Cup, but a slight help to stay in the O’Reilly series as well. There’s a couple of us that have kind of found home here. I mean, Justin (Allgaier) always comes to mind. He’s going to end his career, I’m sure, in this series at some point. It’s a fun series. It competitive. I’m not winning every week. It’s a dog fight to go out there and win these races. It’s a perfect combination, in my opinion, of racing, the competition, the whole year, really, as a whole, as far as the workload goes.”
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