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Photo credit: (HHP/Gregg Ellman)
For any rookie there is always a bit of a learning curve, but for Brandon Jones he has several veterans surrounding him to help guide the way in his first full NASCAR season.
One of the younger drivers in the garage, 19-year-old Jones pilots the No. 33 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet in the NASCAR XFINITY Series. He’s fifth in the standings with seven top 10s ahead of next weekend’s Subway Firecracker 250 (July 1 at 7:30 p.m. ET, NBCSN, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio).
At RCR, Jones has a stable of teammates with a variety of experience in Brendan Gaughan (No. 62 Chevrolet) and the brothers Dillon, Ty (No. 3 Chevrolet) and Austin (No. 2 Chevrolet) as well as Paul Menard (No. 2 Chevrolet) to lean on for advice and guidance.
“The biggest thing everybody’s helped me out with is not coming so much to the tracks I’ve been to in the past, but the tracks that we haven’t seen so far,” Jones said at Iowa Speedway last week.
“People like Brendan and all the teammates really they help me out a lot. We’ve got a lot of notes from previous years from everybody that goes to driver debriefs so I have that to kind of go over and look through. They are just always there to help me out if they see something.”
Gaughan, who has 20 years of NASCAR experience, shares an easy rapport with the young Jones as evidenced by their willingness to play off their similar first names and their exchange when the elder statesman of the RCR team asked Jones how old he was during a recent press conference. When Jones answered, 40-year-old Gaughan buried his head in his hand.
Just past halfway in the regular season of the XFINITY Series, Gaughan likes what he has seen from Jones.
“When he goes out and runs top 10 just about every week, it’s not like you need to keep giving him a lot of coaching,” Gaughan said. “You just want to try to keep the head on straight, keep him pointed in the right direction — and he does a good job of that already to begin with.”
Jones also has the experience to draw on from crew chief Mike Hillman Jr. atop his pit box. Hillman comes from a racing background but he used another sport to describe how the young driver gets ready, especially for a track that’s new to him. Coming into this season, Jones, a Georgia native, had 30 NASCAR national series starts split between the XFINITY Series and Camping World Truck Series.
“It’s kind of like being a quarterback; he watches a lot of game film, a lot of in-car camera stuff and the races that have been run at the racetracks before to try and be on top of it before we ever get here,” Hillman told NASCAR.com at Iowa.
Hillman notices the cool and calm demeanor with which Jones carries himself. The duo bonded away from the track as well and Hillman, age 37 and a father of three, has welcomed Jones into his family.
“To have the age difference between the two of us, but to have a lot of things in common and enjoy a lot of things outside of racing, it’s really cool to be able to hang out and grow together,” Hillman said.
Hillman, a New York native, brings a wealth of experience and knowledge from working primarily in the Camping World Truck Series and winning two championships with Todd Bodine, as well as working with young drivers such as Kyle Larson, Jeb Burton, Cameron Hayley and Ben Rhodes. Last season, Hillman was atop the pit box for Brian Scott and the No. 2 team at RCR in the XFINITY Series.
Under Hillman’s guidance, Jones is in a comfortable position to be one of the 12 drivers competing in the debut of the NASCAR XFINITY Series Chase, which begins Sept. 24 at Kentucky Speedway. While Jones has been consistent in averaging a finish of 11.4 — fifth-best among XFINITY Series regulars — he has yet to record a top-five finish in 2016, and has been out front for just 36 laps (all coming at Talladega in April).
Those are among the next steps Hillman wants to see Jones make as the series gets closer to the postseason.
“We have to take our eighth-, ninth- and 10th-place finishes and make them fourth, fifths and sixths,” Hillman said. “And then once we do that, we can start making them firsts, seconds and thirds, and just take it a step at a time. Hopefully, if we keep doing that and progressing the way we are, by the time we get to the Chase, we’re in a spot to be in contention.”