DARLINGTON, S.C. — Erik Jones is back in a Cup car this weekend at Darlington Raceway after he sat out last week’s race despite being cleared to compete.
Jones suffered a compression fracture in a lower vertebrae in an April 21 crash at Talladega Superspeedway. He sat out the following weekend at Dover and was cleared to run at Kansas but did not.
It’s rare to see a driver willingly sit out a race after being approved by a doctor to return — Jones admits he wanted to come back last weekend before deciding otherwise with the team — but there is a reason for his decision.
“If I really pushed it, I could have been in the car last week, I think — if I really, really wanted to be,” Jones said Saturday in response to a question from NBC Sports. “But if I make that call on my own, and overrule and go out and re-injure myself, I kind of look like an idiot in some ways, right?
“Sunday of Kansas was really when I started feeling better, so to say that I could have gotten in last week and truly been at my full potential, and not – number one, be sore – and not, number two, be in the back of my mind saying, ‘If I hit the wall right now, how is that going to go?’ I think I would have probably been lying to myself. So when you take those conversations and take a step back for a second, I feel like you get a broader picture and that’s kind of where I ended up on the weekend.”
Jones said he also considered other factors in his decision to sit out at Kansas and have Corey Heim drive the No. 43 car for Legacy Motor Club.
“I think the way that we really looked at it – at the end of the day – I’m 27, 28 this month, years old,” Jones said. “I hope to race in NASCAR for a handful of more years, right? I hopefully have more than a decade. That is a lot of races. That is 500 or something like that.
