Legacy Motor Club has to be shaking its head after a promising day turned sour at Phoenix Raceway.
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Erik Jones, the driver for the No. 43 Toyota for Legacy, looked to be heading for his best race of the season.
Toyota was the class of the field in the Shriners Children's 500, but Jones' potential top-10 finish was wiped out when he had a run-in with Stewart-Haas Racing's Chase Briscoe on the final restart of the race with 92 laps left.
Briscoe, Jones and Bubba Wallace ended up fighting for the same piece of space on the track, and Briscoe went wide forcing Wallace up into Jones. The only place Jones could go from there was into the wall.
After his No. 43 hit the wall, Jones lost all the track position he had fought so hard for the entire race. He then reported to his team that something was bent on his car. The damage was enough to relegate him to a 31st-place finish, seven laps down.
Jones admitted after the race that it isn't the first time he's had trouble racing Briscoe.
.@Erik_Jones not happy with how @ChaseBriscoe_14 raced him at Phoenix. "He seems to have an issue with me every week."
📹: @TheBryanNolen pic.twitter.com/LDPp4xjyz1
— Frontstretch (@Frontstretch) March 10, 2024
"(Chase Briscoe) was dragging us down over and over, restart after restart and he put us four wide because he was slowing us down so much," Jones explained to frontstretch.com. "I got wrecked, so, that sucks. But he seems to have an issue with me every week. If I call him this week, he probably won't call me back. And I'd love to talk to him."
Briscoe, who ended the race with a top-10 finish, had a message of his own for Jones, saying that he doesn't recall any previous run-ins with Jones.
"If he calls me, I'll gladly answer. I've never really talked to Erik before, I don't have a problem with him at all," Briscoe said.
Briscoe admitted that if you want to contend in these races, you have to be aggressive.
Jones and Briscoe have different views about what happened in Phoenix. Expect more from this as the series heads to Bristol, which is a favorite track for drivers to even the score against other drivers.
