Wrecking a rival isn’t an option for Erik Jones

With nearly 300 starts, and having been a full-time Cup driver since 2017, it would be difficult to find a moment where Jones intentionally drove ‘dirty’ against his fellow competitors. Sitting 27th in points, he finds himself in a must-win situation, just like Richmond winner Austin Dillon. But if he were faced with a similar situation at the end of one of the next three races, would he consider going anywhere near as far as the driver of the No. 3 did?

“No. No, not a chance,” he asserted in a Saturday press conference. “I don’t race that way. I wouldn’t have done it. I can probably count – I honestly don’t know – less than five times that I’ve wrecked anyone intentionally in my entire career. Just not the way I race. Everyone’s got their own code. Everybody has different ways that they go about it. For me, that’s just not the way I raced.”

After a year of struggles for Legacy Motor Club, a win would go very far in helping them salvage something out of 2024, but even still, Jones is a firm ‘no’ on intentional wrecking. Recently, he signed a multi-year contract extension to continue driving for LMC and in a hypothetical question, he was asked about a deal where his team tells him to wreck his way to Victory Lane.

“I don’t think I could do that,” reiterated Jones. “That’s not to say that things don’t change in the moment, and how you were raced before that changes things. Obviously, that was not the situation here, but it depends on what is going down, but it is really not in my playbook.”

The trickle-down effect

Another issue with the Richmond melee is how it may affect driving etiquette in lower divisions throughout the country. The NASCAR Cup Series is supposed to be the pinnacle — setting the example for the rest of the ranks — so if the stars are plowing through each other for race wins, up-and-comers may see that as an excuse to do the same.

Speaking on the ‘trickle-down effect,’ Jones agreed that it has an impact on driving standards across the board: “What we do on Sunday trickles down and not just to Xfinity and Trucks and ARCA; it trickles down to late models, street stocks, front wheel drives, quarter midgets, go-karts – all of these guys and kids watch what we do on Sunday, and think what we do is right.

“I think racing has changed a lot since 2009 — that was the…