Following Sunday’s (March 22) Goodyear 400 at Darlington Raceway, the spotlight was on Tyler Reddick, and rightfully so after picking up his fourth win across the first six races of the NASCAR Cup Series season.
But behind him, another Toyota driver quietly put together a good run. Erik Jones piloted the No. 43 Legacy Motor Club Toyota to a 10th-place finish, matching his best finish of the season and collecting just the second top 10 of the season for his team. For Jones, it was another good day at a racetrack where he has experienced a great deal of success over the course of his Cup career.
Victory lane at Darlington is a spot typically reserved for the cream of the crop. In fact, out of the nine active full-time drivers to have won at the Track Too Tough to Tame, eight of them have either won a Cup Series championship or made the Championship 4 of the now-defunct NASCAR playoffs. The lone outlier is, in the words of the late great Ken Squier, that Jones boy.
Jones is one of just four active drivers with multiple Darlington checkered flags to his name. He won the 2019 Southern 500 in just the third Darlington Cup start of his career, driving the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota to victory in the wee hours of Labor Day morning following a lengthy rain delay.
Jones backed that up with a win in the 2022 Southern 500 with his current team. That 2022 triumph remains the most recent Cup Series win for Jones, Legacy Motor Club and the iconic No. 43 car number.
Outside of the two wins, Jones has shown solid consistency whenever the Cup Series stops by the famed track in South Carolina. Here is a deeper dive into Jones’ career stats at the Lady in Black:
Unsurprisingly, Jones’ Darlington numbers have noticeably fallen off after he left JGR and joined Legacy in 2021. However, even in inferior equipment, Jones has continued to run respectably at Darlington. And lately, since LMC transitioned to Toyota at the start of the 2024 season, his performance in South Carolina has begun to trend back upward. In the five races in LMC Toyotas, Jones has an average finish of 14.6, including making the podium in third place in last year’s Southern 500.
Furthermore, at a track known to wear down drivers and tracks, Jones is almost always there at the end. He has completed 97.5% (5,427 of 5,568) of the laps in his 17 starts at Darlington with only two DNFs. And more often than not, Jones is finishing a Darlington race inside the top 10, placing there in 58.8% (10 of 17) of his Cup Series starts at the track.
Jones deserves his flowers for sustained success at Darlington over the entire course of his Cup career, and he should be a driver that fans follow more closely at the Southern 500 this fall or whenever the Cup Series stops to pay a visit to the Lady in Black.
Race By The Numbers
Let’s take a closer look at some of the key numbers that tell the story of Sunday’s Cup Series race at Darlington:
3 – Number of Drivers to Win Four of the First Six Races in a Cup Season
As aforementioned, Reddick made another piece of NASCAR history this weekend, becoming the third driver to win four of the first six races of a Cup Series.
Reddick finds himself in elite company as the other two drivers to achieve the feat are Dale Earnhardt in 1987 and Bill Elliott in 1992.
In both cases, Earnhardt and Elliott carried their momentum throughout the season as championship contenders. In 1987, Earnhardt won 11 races and cruised to the championship with a 489-point cushion over Elliott. On the other hand, Elliott in 1992 collapsed down the stretch and lost the title to Alan Kulwicki by a mere 10 points.
Obviously, Reddick will be hoping to follow in Earnhardt’s footsteps rather than Elliott’s in this situation.
142 – Laps Led by Brad Keselowski
Following his leg injury in December, Brad Keselowski and his No. 6 team entered 2026 with a good amount of uncertainty. As he has done so many times in his career, the 2012 Cup Series champion has responded positively to the adversity, and Darlington was his best performance of the season so far.
At 142 laps led, Keselowski was on point for 48.5% of the 293-lap race on Sunday. Keselowski’s runner-up finish marked the second top five and third top 10 in six races so far this season, and at ninth in points, he is currently right in the thick of Chase contention.
16.3 – Daniel Suarez’s Average Finish So Far in 2026
Daniel Suarez continues to be one of the surprising drivers early in 2026, taking seventh in the Spire Motorsports No. 7 Chevrolet on Sunday.
His 16.3 average finish through the first six races is an improvement of 4.6 positions from his 20.9 average last year with Trackhouse Racing. It is also right on par with his career-best 16.2 average finish during his rookie year with JGR in 2017.
Suarez has shown the Cup field that he could be a mainstay in the conversation to make the Chase this season.
Andrew Stoddard joined Frontstretch in May of 2022 as an iRacing contributor. He is a graduate of Hampden-Sydney College, the University of Richmond, and VCU. He works as an athletic communications specialist at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va.
And Erik could quite likely have finished even higher if he hadn’t been dumped by Hamblin.