NASCAR Cup Series star reveals how becoming a Dad has changed his life

NASCAR star Erik Jones has opened up on how his first year as a father has changed his life.

The 29-year-old finished his ninth full-time Cup Series season last month, but his first as a father – after the birth of his son David Wayne Jones last November.

Jones opened up this week on the ways that he's found fatherhood has changed his life, particularly with a packed 38-race schedule to contend with, and named the single biggest change.

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Erik Jones reveals life changes

Jones told Racing Electronics: "It's been different, I think in a couple of ways. The biggest thing is that it changes your perspective a lot, it makes you look at things pretty different.

"The hardest thing is probably that your schedule changes so much, you live your whole like where you're making it work for you, what you want to do, and you're picking and choosing your time, and then all of a sudden you're not really on your time anymore, you're on his time now.

"It's a big balance of me trying to help out and be there and take on the workload with David, and Holly taking on the workload, but I would say the schedule thing is the biggest change of all."

NASCAR star opens up on packed calendar

Speaking more generally about his hectic racing schedule both in and out of NASCAR, he admitted: "Yeah. It's uh, it's pretty busy. I was talking with somebody yesterday and we were kind of laughing about my schedule at times and how busy it gets.

“I told him, ‘Look man, I’m just front-loading my whole life and career right now’, I hope to retire sooner than people normally get to retire, so I’m just gonna front-load all my work for that time.

“So I don’t mind it. It's all fun stuff, getting to race cars for a living is a pretty cool job and a pretty big blessing, so doing that along with the charity work, and the super late model stuff, it's all stuff I love.”