(Photo: Wayne Riegle | The Podium Finish)
BROOKLYN, Mich. — Brandon Jones put together a clean, complete race and battled up front for position during a late restart to finish third in Saturday’s Cabo Wabo 250 at Michigan International Speedway.
“What a great day for us, really mistake-free,” Jones told SiriusXM after the race. “I think about back to where the season started up to this point and just kind of getting knocked down, getting knocked down, make a mistake and just continuing to not let that eat us up.
“This has always [been a track] that I know ‘oh my gosh,’ I can come here, I can win this race. I think that the last three years, I’ve had a second, a fourth and a third now, so really, really good results.”
Jones has struggled to finish races this season and has just six top 10s to show for it. He finished outside the top 20 in nine of his first 17 races with JR Motorsports after transitioning from Joe Gibbs Racing in the off-season but has seemed to overcome some of the mishaps as of late.
The 26-year-old from Atlanta, Georgia had contending speed at New Hampshire Motor Speedway in July but spun out late and managed to preserve an 11th-place finish. He finished seventh two weeks ago at Pocono Raceway before crashing in practice at Road America and recovering in the race with a top 10.
But at Michigan, he put the previous errors aside. After missing his marks during Friday’s qualifying lap and starting 14th, Jones methodically worked his way through the field and earned a total of seven stage points — five in Stage 1 and two and Stage 2.
While running fourth with 12 laps to go, the caution came out for a Patrick Emerling spin. Jones was third on top for the restart, and despite the lane seemingly getting a bad restart, Jones cleared Ty Gibbs for third out of Turn 2.
“I didn’t get necessarily a great launch, but I don’t think that may be the key to winning a race late like this,” Jones said of the late restart. “I was really banking on [Josh Berry] getting a great restart, kind of sliding up because he hasn’t won a race yet. I was thinking in my head maybe that he’s going to get a little bit aggressive with the 20 (John Hunter Nemechek), he may be running him up the track. As soon as that happens, they always lose momentum. The 20 is going to have to lift, the 8 is going to have to lift to not wreck and I could have taken advantage and gone bottom. You try to like run all these scenarios through your head.
“I got through [Turns] 1 and 2 really well, but nothing kind of happened. They didn’t really slide up anything, but the key was to get through 1 and 2 really well, and I was able to pin some guys down on the bottom.”
Jones races Brett Moffitt at Michigan. (Photo: Wayne Riegle | The Podium Finish)
Jones got a run on Berry down the backstretch with three laps to go for third but made contact with his teammate after a moment of indecision. That’s where he ended up finishing. John Hunter Nemechek pulled away and won his fifth race of the season.
“I got a good run, but it’s so tough to take these runs, so I got a little indecisive,” Jones said. “You almost just need to trust your instinct and go with it, and if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. If it does, great. [Berry] started to shave low because I got a run and I really didn’t just pull big left, I kind of eased left. He kind of eased left with me. But then we were getting to the corner and so I thought ok, I didn’t get to the inside of him, so maybe he’s going to kind of get back up to give himself room to get into the corner, and he never really did.”
With five races remaining in the regular season, Jones made ground on the cutline. He entered Saturday’s race 14th in points 61 behind Sheldon Creed and exited 45 behind.
Jones isn’t ruling out the ability to lock himself into the playoffs, acknowledging he needs to have a string of runs similar to Saturday between now and the finale at Kansas Speedway. However, winning his way in is the most straightforward option.
“At this point, you’re almost kind of racing time a little bit,” Jones said. “I think that a win solves it all. I think that the ultimate goal here is still just to get a win. We have Kansas, we have Darlington left for the ovals, which are phenomenal tracks for me. I’ve done it multiple times with these places. Even the road course we could do really well at. I’m not going to say that I’m going to go and just dominate and lead the whole road course, but I can certainly put ourselves in a position to take advantage of the mistakes of other people. That’s kind of my mindset.”
