Erik Jones was transported to a local medical facility following this violent crash on Sunday in the NASCAR Cup Series race at Talladega Superspeedway.
In the immediate aftermath, the driver of the Legacy Motor Club No. 43 was checked and released from the infield care center but conceded that his back got stretched out and that he expected to feel sore over the next week.
“I’m sore, it just really stretched it out a lot,” said Jones after being checked and released. “So, it’ll be a long week, just trying to get recovered and feeling better for next week. But I’m alright.”
Right after the crash, over his team radio, he said his back was in pain and there was audible pain in his voice.
By the end of the race, within an hour from his release, he opted to get a further evaluation.
Meanwhile, what exactly happened in the first place?
The seven Toyota Racing Development cars had pitted on Lap 151, earlier than everyone else, with the end goal of jumping ahead of the Fords and Chevrolets whenever they chose to come down pit road. They felt like, running single-file, they would have enough speed make up the difference.
“I thought we were plenty fast enough …” Hamlin said. “As soon as everyone pitted it, we were gonna cycle to the front, is what the goal was.”
But the pushes that gave them that intended speed proved to be their collective undoing.
Jones was sent nose-first into the SAFER Barrier in Turn 3 off a push from Bubba Wallace but the shoving came from behind them both in the form of John Hunter Nemechek. The incident also collected Denny Hamlin.
“We were all pushing really hard to keep our line going,” Wallace told FOX Sports. “”We had a plan and just didn’t execute it as well as we should. Hate it for our Leidos team. Look forward to running these places and then you just get trapped in somebody else’s mess, but I hate it. It doesn’t make us look good at all. But all in all, we’ll just reset and go to Dover. We’ve got a long way to go. We’re fine. Just frustrating.”
Jones said, “It was real late to be pushing on the straightaway. I don’t know if (Wallace) was being pushed from behind. I definitely wasn’t pushing (Tyler Reddick) at that point. It was way too late to be pushing. It was definitely overaggressive.”
Hamlin agreed with that.
“Someone made a mistake,” he said. “You can’t push in the corner, for sure, and I don’t know where it started but you just can’t push that close to the corner.”
Nemechek, Jones, Wallace and Hamlin all finished outside of the top-30 but Toyota and 23XI Racing earned a degree of retribution in winning the race with Reddick. It was the first in-person win for team co-owner Michael Jordan.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.