With crew chief back, Jones looks to ride hot streak into playoffs with Bristol win

BUY TICKETS: See the races in Bristol  Erik Jones looked poised for his first Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series victory as he lined up second behind Martin Truex Jr. on the final restart Sunday at Michigan International Speedway. And he almost did. After Kyle Larson jolted past Truex for the lead, the 21-year-old rookie held on for a still-solid third-place finish. But for a brief, fleeting moment, he caught glimpse of victory. “We were kind of in our own league there for a long time – were kind of matching lap times, he would go faster and I would go faster," Jones said of the Furniture Row Racing cars. "I really thought that whoever was out front was going to win, unfortunately neither of us got it done. Neither of us really got going great after that last restart. I spun my tires, he spun his and it just wasn’t what we needed at the end.” Lucky for Jones & Co., the Monster Energy Series heads to Bristol Motor Speedway this week, a track where Jones has flexed his muscle in the past. He has two wins there in the XFINITY Series, the most recent one the spring race earlier this season. In his lone Monster Energy Series start at “The Last Great Colosseum,” he finished 17th, but ran with the leaders the majority of the day. This provides a bit of confidence. “We looked back to the spring race, we ran really well – I thought we were really fast all weekend long in practice, didn’t get to qualify due to rain,” Jones told NASCAR.com. “But ran up front, ran in the top three all day long, right there with the 78 and the 42. “So that just gives us a lot of confidence going back; I think we’re going to have that speed again. Hopefully, the track is doing the same thing with the PJ1 and applying it on the bottom that we’ll be able to bring back the same package and hopefully have similar speed that we did there a few months ago.” Jones will also have crew chief Chris Gayle back atop the pit box, as Gayle has served his two-race suspension for a Pocono infraction. The No. 77 team currently sits 16th in the driver standings, but 19th in the playoff standings, a position where Jones essentially needs a win to make the playoffs. RELATED: Full playoff standings Having a familiar voice call the shots on the radio bodes well for the young star in this position -- Jones will need all the chips available as he looks to gamble his way into the playoffs with three races to go before the field is set. And gamble they will, Jones said. “You’ve got to be aggressive,” Jones said. “As a driver, I have to be aggressive, as a crew chief, Chris Gayle has to be aggressive. …We’re not racing for top 10s anymore – we’re racing to just try to snag a win. That’s the only thing that really means anything to us at this point in the season. … “You know, it’s unfortunate, I think back to a lot of races on the year where we didn’t get the finish we could have gotten or had a DNF that wasn’t necessarily our fault. It’s frustrating to pick out those races and think if they would have went a little bit differently, we could be in a lot better position. But (we're) definitely being aggressive and trying to snag the win right now.” While the team views all remaining tracks – Bristol, Darlington and Richmond – as opportunities to create its own destiny, Jones said the short track in northeast Tennessee is the one they are especially focusing on. “I think we've all got Bristol circled as a team,” Jones said. “We ran really well there in the spring. We didn't get the finish we wanted, but we had a really fast race car. “Obviously it's a huge goal to make the playoffs, and I know we're capable of it," he said later. "We've just got to go out and make it happen, and it goes back to execution. We've had fast race cars at a multiple number of races, we just haven't put the whole day together, whether it be we didn't qualify well or we qualified well and had a bad stop late or whatever else. “It's just going to take putting an entire weekend together. It starts on Friday and ends with a good day on Sunday.” Or in this case, Saturday night under the lights.