P. J. Jones - Racing Career - 2000s

2000s

As with Scott Pruett and Robby Gordon, Jones decided to leave open-wheel racing and make a full-time switch to NASCAR, where he had spent the middle of the preceding decade. Unlike the other two former CART competitors, Jones would focus on the Busch Series rather than the premier Cup division, where he would enter just two races (one in relief of Gordon, who was participating in the rain-delayed 2000 Indianapolis 500 while the Coca-Cola 600 commenced with Jones in the cockpit of the #13 Burger King Ford).

Jones' season started with BACE Motorsports, a team which had won three Busch Series titles from 1995-1997. It was not to be a championship effort, however, even with a talent like Jones controlling the car styled as a Chevrolet Monte Carlo silhouette. With no results better than the twenty-fourth spot by the end of seven races, Jones was relieved of his driving duties, and relieved of the burdens that came with driving for an under-performing team.

David Ridling was impressed with Jones, and the driver would not remain a free agent for long. Without missing a single meeting of the Busch Series, Jones was in Ridling's #19, bettering his performances to include a seventeenth place run on Loudon's Magic Mile and a top ten in the Watkins Glen event, a race over which Jones expressed disappointment weeks later in Nazareth, claiming in an interview on CBS with Glenn Jarrett that he and the team "should have won."

Jones would return to Watkins Glen in August for the second of his two Winston Cup races; he was quietly twenty-first for Felix Sabates and SABCO Racing as a substitute driver for Ted Musgrave, himself a replacement to the late Kenny Irwin, Jr. (against whom Jones had race in USAC).

By September, rumors were circulating that Jones could join a newly-formed Galaxy Motorsports and Robert Yates Racing conglomerate for the next season. The team never formed.

The Busch Series was a suitable home for Jones, and he returned in 2001 with Phoenix Racing, a team owned by James Finch and sponsored by Yellow Freight, the same brand featured on his Ridling car the prior year. Qualifying third for the season-starting Daytona race and scoring a best result of seventeenth on the Atlanta Motor Speedway's oval (reconfigured from when it featured an infield road course on which Jones had raced in IMSA GTP), Jones was not able to please team manager Marc Reno. He was ousted for Jimmy Spencer, significant in that Spencer would later succeed him at both Ultra Motorsports and the Arnold Development team; he would not be the last driver Phoenix would release prematurely, joined now in that category by his former midget rival Mike Bliss, among others.

With 2001's disappointment now trailing him as another car on a train of unfortunate circumstances and less-than-stellar results, Jones spent 2002 in a variety of series, including the USAC Silver Crown Series where he had found success earlier in his career. Jones parlayed this into a chance to run the Indianapolis 500-mile race with Team Menard; it was to be his Indy Racing League debut and return to top-level North American open-wheel racing after a hiatus that inaugurated on October 31, 1999. Misfortune was still inseparable from Jones, and a neck injury during May's practice runs removed him from the competitive mount; his replacement, Raul Boesel, placed the car on the front row.

Jones' relationship with Menards was not over, though; a Busch Series race at Phoenix was scheduled later in the year, and Jones contested that NASCAR sweepstakes in a Chevrolet wearing the home improvement chain's livery.

Between these events, though, was the SIRIUS Satellite Radio at the Glen, a Winston Cup bout to take place on the New York road course where Jones had vast experience and a prior top ten. A.J. Foyt selected Jones for the race, giving the figurative keys to the #14 Conseco Pontiac's ignition over to a driver who, like Foyt, had participated in a variety of racing disciplines. Although Jones had failed to qualify for the previous race, the Brickyard 400, in Foyt machinery, this race was to be the statistical high point of Jones' NASCAR career. Jones finished fourth, impressing with his ability to brake later than most of his competitors on the run into turn one.

Jones would be invited to return to the Foyt team in 2003, this time for the Dodge/Save Mart 350 to be held on the Sonoma Raceway. For the second time in three attempts with Foyt, Jones failed to qualify for the race, frustrating Foyt to the point that Jones would not be welcomed back to defend his top five from 2002. Instead, Jones would race a Pontiac Grand Prix for Morgan-McClure Motorsports; he finished twenty places further down the order than he had the previous year.

Nearly a decade removed from his Winston West win with Ultra Motorsports, Jones returned to the Jim Smith-captained team for the Craftsman Truck Series' season-closer. Jones has not seen the Homestead-Miami Speedway, site of this race, since his CART days; it was newly redesigned for 2003, so this was not to P.J.'s detriment. In the #27 Dodge, a special entrant that was not normally found on the rosters of Truck Series races but had been dispatched to Florida to try to help the team secure a driver's championship for Ted Musgrave, Jones scored a top ten finish, reminding the auto racing world of how strong he had once been in a racing truck.

In May 2004, Jones was finally able to make his debut in the Indianapolis 500, a race his father won in 1963. The rain-shortened race was reduced in length for all competitors, but even more so for Jones, who crashed.

Jones would be on NASCAR's sidelines until June 2004. Don Arnold was trying to establish his new team, campaigning Dodge-brand stock cars, and believed that Jones could help in this difficult process. Debuting at Pocono Raceway, Jones took a solid twenty-second place, besting even the best performance of a Daytona 500 champion like Derrike Cope, who had only managed twenty-ninth in his brightest day for Arnold Development. The subsequent four races all ended in dismay, with Jones and the #50 team retiring from each of these races before ending their relationship.

Jim Smith, pleased with Jones' services from the prior year, brought the driver back to his team for the Fontana and Phoenix races, two Western rounds for a Western driver. The #2 team had been using a rotating lineup of racing talents all season, so Jones did not displace anyone, even though he was participating in a racing truck that ran the full schedule. Mirroring the successful performance with Ultra in the West Series race of 1994, Jones scored a top ten in the Truck round in Phoenix, a rare highlight in a promising career soiled by unplanned failure.

Appearances were sparse in 2005, as ten of Jones' fourteen scheduled races ended prior to the race; Jones was unable to qualify for these events. Mostly racing with MACH 1 Motorsports, Jones was also able to land the Morgan-McClure ride for the road courses. In both rides, Jones struggled mightily, now deeply into the twilight of his NASCAR career.

2006, like 2004, began in May for P.J. Jones, once again in the Indianapolis 500. Beck Motorsports hired Jones to pilot the #98 CURB Records entry, identical in sponsor and number to the 2004 special Jones had driven. Running a Panoz chassis, widely regarded as inferior to the Dallara which populated a greater portion of the field, Jones lacked pace and only managed to qualify on the final row. However, a nineteenth place result was salvaged.

The next stop on the Jones racing calendar was Sonoma, now becoming a tradition with P.J. characterized in NASCAR as a road course ringer. Jones did not see the race out to its completion in his Morgan-McClure Chevrolet due to rear end failure, and would not return to the NEXTEL Cup Series that season.

Instead, Jones retreated to the Busch division, where his success had been limited in the earlier parts of the noughties. Starting last in Mike Curb's Diversified Partners Dodge for the July Daytona race, Jones mastered the slipstreaming techniques of NASCAR's draft and worked his way to thirteenth by the race's end in a reinvigorating performance. The IRP meeting would not end as successfully for Jones, who then moved to Johnny Davis Motorsports to compete in Watkins Glen. A stellar eighth-place qualifying effort was squandered by an engine failure on the seventh lap of the motor race; Jones had taken the JD Motorsports car to places it had never been on the grid's north end, and was compensated with mechanical incompetence. He would never race for Davis again, and returned to Curb for the Fontana and Phoenix legs as he had for Smith in the 2004 Truck Series season. Twenty-second and twenty-first were the results in those races.

As NASCAR Busch Series left the United States for the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, Richard Childress Racing brought P.J. Jones with their team for the road course event. Another top ten qualifying run turned into a mediocre result; this time, Jones was twenty-fourth.

The disappointment would intensify in May, however, when Jones failed to qualify for the 2007 Indianapolis 500. His #40 car had been painted to resemble the one his father used in the 1967 Indianapolis 500 forty years prior; that car was powered by a turbine gas engine and used a four-wheel drive system. Both technologies had since been outlawed at the Speedway and were not featured on the 2007 entry for P.J.

Putting this behind him, Jones progressed to the NASCAR West Series race on the Sonoma Raceway. Starting seventh and finishing second, Jones regained his rhythm in the #24 Ford one day before he would participate in the Cup Series race on the same track. That, too, was an impressive day for P.J., as he took a Michael Waltrip Racing Toyota from the final grid position to twelfth, his best NASCAR result since 2002. MWR would request his talents for the Watkins Glen race in August, and Jones would oblige. This time, he was classified as twenty-fifth.

Additionally, Jones raced in the Pennsylvania 500 for Robby Gordon Motorsports after the driver for which the team was named was suspended for actions detrimental to stock car racing. The race's victor finished a full two laps ahead of P.J. on the triangular circuit.

MB Motorsports decided Jones was worthy of a chance in the Truck Series in 2008, giving the driver their #63 Ford for two races. Results could not be produced and the series which Jones had been part of at the onset would never again be graced by his driving abilities.

Jones did not just close his Truck Series career, however. He made his final West Series and Nationwide starts; both were DNFs.

Of course, his dips into the Sprint Cup Series action did continue. Jones had a lackluster run in the Hall of Fame Racing Toyota in the 2008 Watkins Glen race. In 2009, he reunited with Robby Gordon Motorsports to test his skills in the start-and-park style of motoring; he conserved the car in two races that year and ensured that Gordon would collect purse money without having to worry about repairing damage or refurbishing worn parts.