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Erik Jones will embark on a Sunoco Rookie of the Year campaign in the No. 77 Toyota for Furniture Row Racing, starting with the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series' biggest race -- the Daytona 500 (Feb. 26, 2 p.m. ET, FOX, MRN, SiriusXM) at Daytona International Speedway.
The transition means getting acclimated to a new crew, new team principals and a new full-time series. It's also meant a learning process merely to find the location of Furniture Row's shop, based in Denver, Colorado.
"No, I didn't get it on the first time," Jones said with a smile, admitting that he drove right past the organization's home base on his first trip to the Rockies. "It's funny. You go out there, there's no sign, there's nothing that would say, hey, there's a race team here. So I went by it a few times before I was able to find it.
"It's cool. That's definitely an old-school feel. As competitive as they are, there's no other race team like that that has that same thing."
If its headquarters harken back to a previous era, Furniture Row Racing's performance has been anything but dated. A breakout four-win season for Martin Truex Jr., who led the most laps in the series last year, reinforced the notion that the organization was ripe for expansion to a two-car team.
Enter the new-school Jones, who at age 20 has already accomplished plenty in the NASCAR ladder system under the tutelage of Kyle Busch Motorsports and Joe Gibbs Racing, the Toyota powerhouse that has a technical alliance with Furniture Row. Jones secured the Camping World Truck Series championship in 2015 and came within a fouled-up restart of vying for the XFINITY Series crown in last year's finale.
Though Jones' progress has been deeply linked to Toyota and Joe Gibbs Racing affiliates, he's meandered through a near-constant shuffle of personnel and teams since his NASCAR national series debut in 2013. That trend continues in 2017. He'll be getting better acquainted with a new teammate in Truex, who -- JGR alliance aside -- has flown solo with Furniture Row the last three seasons.
"I think that relationship will grow here as we get closer to the season and we all get back into the racing mode," Jones said at the preseason NASCAR media tour in late January, at which point he said his conversations with Truex had been limited. "I'd love to talk to him about transitioning into the Cup Series more, and obviously he went through the same thing coming up from the XFINITY ranks, so yeah, I'd love to hear from him and I think it's going to be a great relationship.
"I think Martin will be a great teammate. He's obviously worked as a teammate before, and I think for Furniture Row, it's going to be beneficial just to have two cars at the race track."
For now, Jones hopes that navigating his rookie year is less challenging than trusting the GPS in suburban Denver. But that will also mean adapting to a new championship format, his third in the last three seasons.
It may also mean adopting a new approach to his first full year in NASCAR's big leagues.
"I think last year, really all throughout my career, I've been a little bit of an all-or-nothing, checkers-or-wreckers kind of driver," Jones says, "and really the format last year I thought played into my hand, and it did until the time the Chase actually started and I realized you had to be consistent for three races -- which we did, and we made it all the way to Homestead and I think it's definitely different this year. You have to position yourself to get the best possible finish you can in every segment and rack up those bonus points to get to the Chase.
"At the end of the day, the more bonus points you have, the better position you're in to make it to Homestead."