NCWTS: ERIK JONES An Opportunity to Head North

MOORESVILLE, N.C. (Aug. 25, 2015) – Last week at Bristol (Tenn.) Motor Speedway, Erik Jones and the No. 4 Toyota Racing team registered their sixth consecutive top-10 finish, and by finishing ahead of both points leader Tyler Reddick and second-place contender Matt Crafton, continued to close the gap in the NASCAR Camping World Truck Series championship standings. Jones trails Reddick by seven points and is one point behind Crafton as the Truck Series heads north of the border this weekend to take on Canadian Tire Motorsport Park (CTMP), a 10-turn road course located in Bowmanville, Ont.

With 14 of 23 races completed this season, the race for the Truck Series championship is shaping up as a battle between two 19-year-olds, Jones and Reddick, and the 39-year-old two-time reigning champion Crafton. Jones fell to fourth in the standings, 33 points behind Crafton, after he was relegated to a 23rd-place finish at Gateway Motorsports Park in Madison Ill., in June. The Michigan native responded with a dominant win the following weekend at Iowa Speedway in Newton, and over the last six races he has produced an average finish of 4.3 to close the gap in the standings back to single digits.

Last year’s Truck Series event at CTMP was the first road-course event of Jones’ career, but by the time the race came around you would have never known. The talented youngster slowly but surely got the hang of making left and right-hand turns, finishing 15^th in the opening practice and improving to eighth in final practice. KBM’s young driver opened eyes when he qualified third and then was able to maintain an average running position of 3.828 throughout the 64-lap event as he brought home a third-place finish.

With Reddick, a former Dirt Late Model standout, making his first road-course start and Crafton producing an average finish of eighth across two starts north or the border, this weekend’s event should provide the No. 4 Toyota Racing team with another opportunity to make gains. Via a route of left and right turns, Jones is ready to seize the opportunity to head north in the championship standings.

“Yea, I like road-course racing. I enjoy it and Canadian Tire Motorsport Park is a cool track — it’s fun to race on it. I enjoyed it last year when I got to go do it, so we’ll see what it’s all about this year. We were fast last year, just didn’t do a good job managing tires on my part. Hopefully we can do a better job keeping the tires on it and staying up front and giving ourselves a shot at the win. Obviously there are going to be road-course guys like Alex Tagliani there that will be pretty good, but I know we will have a fast Toyota Tundra as well. We have the same road-course truck we raced last year and it’ll be fun.”

“It is a lot different. I actually went to the Bondurant School out in Phoenix about a month ago to work with Chris Cook to try and get a little bit more experience. I did a school last year as well, so hopefully this will help get me a little more prepared and a little more experience for the road course and what’s different about it and learn a few more things.”

“It’s definitely fun going to the road courses — I wish that we did it more than once a year. As a crew chief, you have to approach this race differently and keep in mind all the different things that can happen throughout the race and that is what makes it fun. I don’t think you have to play it more conservative being in the championship hunt — I think being conservative can get you in more trouble. Obviously you can’t take real big gambles, but if you’re not in attack mode all the time you are usually going to end up worse off.”

KBM-X134: The No. 4 Toyota Racing team will unload KBM-X134 for the first time this season. The No. 51 team converted the chassis from a short-track truck to a road-course truck for last year’s event at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park and brought home a third-place finish with Jones driving it. The Toyota has collected one win, one pole, four top-five and six top-10 finishes across seven careers starts since being purchased from Xpress Motorsports when KBM came into the Truck Series in 2010. Denny Hamlin went to victory lane with the truck at Martinsville (Va.) Speedway in October of 2012.

Erik Jones 2014

Ryan “Rudy” Fugle will call the shots for Erik Jones’ Truck Series championship campaign in 2015. The New York native led KBM’s No. 51 Tundra team to a series-leading six wins, including Jones’ first-career victory at Phoenix International Raceway, and an Owner’s Championship as crew chief in 2013. He has seven career wins as a Truck Series crew chief, five with Kyle Busch behind the wheel and two with Jones as the pilot. He also contributed to an additional 11 wins in his role as race engineer for the organization during the 2012 and 2014 seasons. Before coming to KBM, Fugle held crew chief positions in both the Truck Series and XFINITY Series with Germain Racing.

Fugle’s lone event calling the shots for a Truck Series race at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park resulted in runner-up finish with Chad Hackenbracht in 2013.