Jones sped off to Slinger Nationals
SLINGER – Six months. That’s how long Erik Jones needed to get over his loss to Matt Kenseth in a slam-bang finish to the 2016 Slinger Nationals.
Now they laugh about it. But for half a year, the run-in with his then-NASCAR teammate was a pebble in his shoe.
Twelve hours.
That’s about how long Jones took to get from his first checkered flag in the NASCAR Cup Series on Saturday night at Daytona International Speedway to Slinger Speedway for his second shot at the Nationals, one of the premier short-track races in the country.
“It was a quick turnaround,” Jones said with a laugh.
“Part of me wanted to (stay longer and celebrate) when it initially happened, but I was excited to get up here and run this one, too.
“It’s kind of cool for me to come right off that and get to run another race. It gives us a chance to win two races in a couple of days, so that’s pretty neat.”
The 22-year-old Jones, a native of Byron, Mich., raced super-late models around the Midwest and beyond with
the express purpose of getting to his sport’s highest level. The 2015 NASCAR truck champion, Jones arrived in Cup last year, and this season he moved into the Joe Gibbs Racing cars Kenseth had driven to 15 victories in five seasons.
Then when Jones broke through Saturday night with a victory in his 57th Cup start, he was back home to North Carolina by 4:30 a.m. with a couple of hours to spare before his 7:30 a.m. flight to Wisconsin. He had the track to himself for a few hours of testing Sunday, took part in a full day of practice Monday and was back at the quarter-mile for the race main event Tuesday night.
“This is a big super-late model race, one of the biggest ones of the year, and it’s just as competitive as anything else,” Jones said.
“It’s not as easy as people think from the outside. You think of coming down and running super-late models with the resources we have in the NASCAR world it would be somewhat easy for us, but it’s not.”
In addition to such track champions Dennis Prunty, Steve Apel and Gary LaMonte, other national-level drivers competing at the 39th Nationals include truck series champion Johnny Sauter, part-time Xfinity Series driver Ty Majeski, ARCA regular Chase Purdy and traveling short-track racers Steve Wallace, Steve Dorer and 2017 winner Bubba Pollard.
Kenseth, a Cup champion from Cambridge, hasn’t been back since 2016, when he won his record seventh Nationals by getting the final bump in an increasingly aggressive bump-and-run battle with Jones.
In the moments after that race, Kenseth pulled the angry Jones aside. He publicly apologized for the way he won, but it was clear the two weren’t going to agree completely on what had happened or what was fair.
“I thought we were by far the two best guys that night,” Jones recalled. “But it’s just unfortunate when you have that fast a car and you can’t seal the deal.
“But I got over that, and that’s what made me want to come back again, to try to finally close one out.”