Photo Credit: Justin McFarland
Despite suffering a pair of speeding penalties under green, Erik Jones managed to come back to score a top-three finish.
Jones was running within the top-five when he headed down pit road for his green-flag pit stop on lap 58. He would be busted by speeding, followed by being busted once again for speeding while serving his pass-thru penalty. The result would be a stop-and-go penalty, which would place him two laps down.
The reason behind the penalties wasn’t determined, but Jones believes there was a mistake in calibrating the dash lights. The teams set the tachometer on the driver’s dashboard in where it lights up once they’re at pit road speed, followed by lighting up again if they go over.
“You have that five mile(s) per hour buffer on pit road when I ran our sets of lights that we were supposed to run, we sped,” he explained. “I went down to the next set of lights and still sped and then at that point I was running the lights that are supposed to be pit road speed – 45 miles per hour – and that was safe. I am guessing we just miss-calibrated something along the way and will have to look into it. Not exactly sure what it is. We’ll find out during the week and fix the mistake.”
The Joe Gibbs Racing driver would use the wave around on lap 73 to get one lap back, before getting the lucky dog with 63 to go. Restarting at the tail of the lead lap cars in 11th, Jones quickly made his way to the front en route to finishing third. Jones said he wasn’t able to make any more ground as he had burnt the tires off in making up the track position.
“I would have loved another caution, said the same thing last week, but would have loved another caution to rerack everybody and get some tires on it and make one more adjustment,” he said. “I kind of had a better idea of what I needed in the car. Just getting in some clean air finally. Just need to stop making mistakes and go into next week and hopefully have a mistake free day.”
It marks the second straight week that the driver of the No. 20 Interstate Batteries Toyota Camry has had to come back from a penalty, as he had to fight back after jumping the green flag at Atlanta Motor Speedway.
“The one thing is we had really good race cars and that’s shown the last two weeks with how we’ve run the last two with Kyle (Busch) winning and us being up there and having a shot,” Jones said. “I just wish we could have been in contention. I felt like our Interstate Batteries Camry was good enough to run with Kyle at times and would have really loved the shot at having him straight up I guess you could say.
“We’ll go on to next week and try again.”
