After sitting out two weeks with a broken lower vertebra, Erik Jones is back in the Legacy Motor Club No. 43 Toyota Camry but he has actually been cleared to compete for two weeks now.
The decision was made last week to keep Corey Heim in the car for a second race, out of an abundance of caution, but also recognizing that Jones can only win his win into the playoffs now by this part of the season.
Darlington Raceway is arguably his best track and the team wanted to make sure he was as healthy as possible for the Goodyear 400. But how does a competitor, one who has been cleared to compete, get talked into additional rest in the first place?
“Look, if I really pushed it, I could have been in the car last week if I really, really wanted to be,” Jones said. “But if I make that call on my own, overrule that, and go out and re-injure myself, I kind of look like an idiot in some ways, right?”
Jones said he took the extra week to ‘step back’ and reevaluate where he really was from a health standpoint in that he was still sore until Sunday night at Kansas. He said it made him ask himself how hitting the wall would affect his recovery at Kansas instead of this weekend at Darlington.
“At the end of the day, the way I looked at it, is that I’m 27, 28 this month and I hope to race NASCAR for a handful more years, hopefully more than a decade,” Jones said. “That is a lot of races so what is the difference of missing one or two?
“There are so many more races down the road so the conversations we had, and those conversations about the races down the road, is what we talked about. We all want me to be in this sport for a long time.
“We’ve seen drivers with nagging injuries, and that they add up, and eventually are forced out of the seat sooner than they wanted to be, be it head or body. … We concluded that two years from now, two races is such a small blip on the radar.”
All told, Jones said he feels 95 percent healthy. He said ‘100 percent’ at first but then conceded that he can’t load weight on his back yet at the gym. But short of that, he says he has full range of motion and no pain doing everyday activities.
His seat has been modified to give his back more support but he also doesn’t have to wear any kind of back bracing in the car or otherwise. Jones jokes that he’s shorter now because he’s lost that vertebra ‘forever’ but that his spine still lines up functionally and that he should suffer no tangible long-term side effects.