Brandon Jones to JR Motorsports has to be one of the biggest ‘Who saw it coming?’ moments in NASCAR in recent memory. In fact, Dale Earnhardt Jr. got a lot of flak over signing the Joe Gibbs Racing driver after the announcement.

Many fans had criticized Junior and insinuated a lot of ‘other factors’ besides Jones’ ability as a racecar driver behind his signing.

However, if the man himself is to be believed, he feels that at JRM, they can extract the 2-5% from Jones that perhaps he himself hasn’t been able to realize yet.

Junior argued that the reason that might work is because of how different his team would be for Jones from that of Coach Gibbs.

In fact, he even mentioned his own example from his early days at Hendrick Motorsports.

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Dale Earnhardt Jr. feels the culture at JRM would be key in Brandon Jones’ development

“When I was racing in the Bud #8 car, there was a lot of me I hadn’t tapped into yet. There was more that I could do that I could be, that I could become,” Earnhardt Jr. said in a recent segment of his podcast.

“I was only half the race car driver that I developed into going to Hendrick and understanding how they do things and learning all kinds of new ways of approaching stuff.”

The NASCAR Hall of Famer emphasized on how much a driver can change when they shift into a different culture, not necessarily because one is better over the other, but simply because they’re different.

“The way Gibbs does things is going to be completely different than the way we do them and that’s gonna expose Brandon to some new thought processes and hopefully it’s going to show up on the racetrack,” Earnhardt Jr. added.

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