By: Zach Catanzareti, Staff Writer
Blake Jones was as surprised as anyone to see his name added to a Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series entry list this weekend at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
Following a year off from racing in 2017, he returned to the driver seat last month at Iowa with BJ McLeod Motorsports. It was the first of four XFINITY Series starts for the small team, finishing a highest of 24th at Chicagoland Speedway.
But before he knew it, he was strapped into a Cup Series car for the first time Friday at New Hampshire. The team? BK Racing.
“This is the day I’ve worked for since I was five years old racing go-karts,” Jones told Kickin’ The Tires. “It still seems so surreal.”
Running his first Cup race in Sunday’s Foxwood’s Casino 300, Jones isn’t stopping there, as he is preparing for return visits to the No. 23 Toyota in the coming months.
“We hope to be in Michigan and run a lot of them after that,” he said. “As a young driver, you have to work your way up the ranks for approval. You have to go to a 1.5-miler before anything else so that’s part of what we’re doing here, going through the ranks.”
Once Jones hits approval, he could wrap up the later weeks of the 2018 Cup season on the racetrack.
“Hopefully by Talladega, we’ll be able to run all of them,” he said. “I’m pretty confident about that. That’s the plan as of now. The sponsorship is behind us so it shouldn’t be a problem to run several races.”
Though this upswing of opportunity in 2018, it didn’t always seem possible for Jones. After a 2017 season that saw next to zero laps on a racetrack, Jones, frankly, didn’t know where his racing career was going. He returned to his family moonshine distillery in Sevierville, Tennessee, and was seemingly moving further away from the cockpit.
“The funding wasn’t there to go racing anymore and we were starting up the distillery… I just didn’t have the time,” he said. “Racing got put on the back burner and I didn’t get focused on it much.”
Jones has proven his worth on the track in the past, winning in only his second ARCA Racing Series start at Talladega in 2015. Despite the early win, it proved not to accelerate his career.
“Once we won Talladega I thought, ‘Yeah, we’ll have something for the rest of the year,'” he said. “But it never came through. You get a lot of phone calls but everybody wanted money.”
The reality of funding hit Jones hard.
“This sport is so money-driven now,” he said. “Sponsorship dollars are what put you in cars and what gets you to go racing. [Funding] ran out about halfway through the [2015] ARCA season. We saw it coming, we hoped we could find somebody else and it just never happened. We got stuck without a ride.”
In the meantime, 2017 saw him continue his work with Tennessee XXX Moonshine, a family company that eventually opened the door again for Jones on the racing side.
“They will be on the car for a lot of this year for the races I run,” he said. “[Moonshine] is how racing was started. Junior Johnson, he ran moonshine. Ralph Earnhardt, they were old-time good guys. A lot of fans can relate to that.
“I still work my regular job as many days a week I can at the distillery. It’s cool to do this on the weekends and do something you love.”
Putting him back in XFINITY, Jones finally has the backing to make his Cup Series debut.
“It just so happened I had sponsorship dollars and they were needing a driver with sponsorship dollars,” he said. “It’s almost like a miracle. I think this is another door that opened.
“It’s a sigh of relief. We spent a lot of money to get here. It will take a few weeks to get through that because all the guys you looked up to as kids, now you’re on the track racing against them.”
Knocking the racing rust off just over a month ago, Jones has no doubt he is ready for the brutality and competitiveness of Cup.
“I don’t have a lot of experience on speedways, 1.5-milers, but I do have a lot of experience in heavy racecars on radial tires,” he said. “A Cup car, once you get here, everybody is a professional racecar driver. There’s no big difference in the drivers, the cars are the big difference here. And that shows.”
(Below is a video capture of our conversation with Blake Jones)
