Coming out of stage two pit stops in the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series Focused Health 302 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on Saturday night, Joe Gibbs Racing driver of the number 20 car Brandon Jones was told by his crew chief that they did not get all of the lug nuts tight after Jones complained of a vibration. Jones chose to stay out on the track.
On lap 55, Jones turned toward the outside wall and collected Justin Allgaier in the JR Motorsports number seven car and sent Allgaier into the wall.
Both drivers had their cars taken to the garage on wreckers while the drivers were sent to the care center for a mandatory check.
Just eleven points behind leader Sheldon Creed at race start, Allgaier finished the race in 34th place and has dropped to fourth place, 30 points behind.
Brandon Jones finished the race in 35th place.
During post race inspection it was discovered that the JGR number 20 car had not one but at least four loose lug nuts and had his car disqualified from the race. With Jones’ placing 35th of 36 cars, he drops only one spot after the disqualification. Jones has also had the seven stage points he earned revoked.
Jones spoke on the on track incident after coming out of the care center saying, “yeah, shoot, it’s just the pit stop. I mean, they’re trying to get me out front, I guess, and it’s just right now every mistake like this is a detriment to the season. It’s like, give up a half-second to maybe just maintain. It’s like, you just don’t have to hit the home runs right now, and I don’t know, I don’t know what we need to do better other than just execute from the the team’s standpoint. Unfortunately, I’m not a finger-pointer at all. I mean, there’s always things that I could do better on all these races, but at the end of the day, it’s all these little decisions of staying out and not pitting, and then having mistakes like this on pit road with the loose wheels. It’s like constant, nonstop things that are out of my control that I can’t figure out how to get to stop.”
He added, “so it’s difficult when it’s like this. It’s really hard to stop the bleeding. You see it time and time again with other cars and other teams and drivers. It’s whoever can not make mistakes, and the guys that make mistakes end up not winning, and they end up falling out like we currently are, unfortunately. So we’ve just got to keep pushing, though. We got to keep going race to race, can’t be a quitter. You can’t give up in these moments.”
Jones concluded, “I just, I hate it for everybody involved. I hate it for the partners, for the team. I mean, they’re not trying to mess up. I know that, right? They’re not trying to put me in these bad situations. It just seems like we just can’t ever make the right decision currently.”
Noting that he had wished Jones would have slowed down instead of trying to “ride out” the loose-wheel, Justin Allgaier said, “I mean, in that scenario, like you’ve already had a couple corners, maybe you just pull down and get out of the way, right? Because when you look at three- and four-wide all the way, I mean, I think we were three- and four-wide all the way through (turns) three and four. The instinct is that you want to stay in it and keep going and maybe it’ll get better, but the law of averages says it usually doesn’t, so I don’t know. It’s disappointing.”