Burton hopes to get back up to speed in COT, Chase

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There's only one driver who has multiple victories at Texas, and it's Jeff Burton. He won the first race held at the track in 1997 and he won again in April this year.

Since then things have been different for Burton. He made the Chase. He's been somewhat consistent. But he hasn't had the finishes he did early in the season.

During a Car of Tomorrow test at Atlanta Motor Speedway, Burton and his team tried to get a grasp on the new machine and admittedly realized they were somewhat behind. He spoke of his thoughts on the COT and on how his Chase has gone in this week's NASCAR teleconference.

Q: Jeff, I'd like you to go back and bring us forward from the time, I guess you had the dubious honor of being the first guy to spin out a Car of Tomorrow here in the test, where that car has come from here to now. And what you and your team have learned in the day and a half you've been here for this test?

Burton: I think the wing has certainly helped a great deal with the stability of the car. Especially around all the cars.

Everybody's pretty much running by themselves like we typically would in a practice. So it's still yet to be determined how good or how bad they're going to be with 43 of them out there.

But from the wing standpoint it's come a long way. There are a lot of little things that have happened since then, but no real big ones as seen by me, other than the wing. And we're still in the exploratory phase at that point, splitter links, all that. They've made a lot of changes, but the wing being the biggest one.

Honestly, in the last day and a half we've learned we've got a lot of work to do. We're behind and we've got four months to get caught up. And it's not because we haven't worked hard. But some other people have just done a better job. We just can't go as fast as we need to go with any of our cars right now. So it's good to know where we are in October and November rather than February. And it's clear we've got some ground to gain.

Q: Can you maybe give a little explanation how much different is the driving behavior between the current Cup car and the COT car?

Burton: As radical as they look, as radically different as they look, they do drive differently, there's no question. But probably not as differently as one would assume.

Typically the struggles that we have with the current car, let's call it, are similar to the struggles we have with the new car. The new car makes overall less grip. It tends to magnify the problem more. But if I read the comments from what I said on Sunday during the race, they're very similar to what I'm seeing today.

It's just in a bigger degree. If we were 30 percent too tight, now we're 50 percent too tight. If we were 30 percent loose, now we're 30 percent too loose.

They just do more of the bad things more of the time and they do it to a worse degree. So they don't drive as good for sure, but not as radically different as the two cars look.

Q: The top two teams in the sport, I guess you'd call them that, Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson, aren't here for this test. Do you look at that as an opportunity to gain two days of testing on them or would you rather to have them here so you can spy on them a little, see what they're doing?

Burton: What it shows to me is they're confidence in their program. They're comfortable with giving up two days of testing at a racetrack that we have the right tires, we have the right racetrack. It's the best conditions you'll ever get for a test. They have the confidence that they can do that and still be in good shape.

So that has a way of, to me, in some ways saying to the world, hey, we're in good shape. In other ways the competitors look at it two different ways. You can look at it as, hey, they're lazy and they don't have focus on what they ought to have focus on, which isn't how I look at it. Or you can look at it as some people look at it as kind of an arrogant standpoint. I don't view it like that.

I believe that they just have confidence in their program. And that they don't have to be here to be successful. That's the way I view it. But a few people have taken note and not been impressed. Others have been impressed.

Q: You're an experienced Chase contender. Have you learned over time anything about the Chase that is exceptional and not like racing as usual?

Burton: I think the really interesting thing about the Chase is when the Chase starts everyone tries to define how the Chase is going to happen. The reality is no one knows how it's going to happen. The old adage of keeping yourself in position to win a football or baseball game, whatever, I think that really holds true in this Chase format. I mean right now today if you look at what it's taken to win, what it will take to win the Chase, look at what Jeff Gordon and Jimmie Johnson have done, not only have they not had problems, they've had great finishes.

The question is if they have any problems at all in the next three races we've got a whole 'nother ballgame. So the number of bad finishes that you're able to have, the number of top-fives, wins you have to have to win it, everybody thinks they understand it. But the reality is no one really knows. Because every Chase is different. The only thing I know for sure is that the better you do, the more chances you put yourself into position to get top-fives, top-sevens, the better chance you have to win it.

And today's Chase you've not been afforded bad finishes. You just can't have them. So the interesting thing to me and the thing I've learned the most is that you can't go into it thinking you know how it's going to pan out. And you have to race every race by itself. You can't be racing Dover worried about Kansas. You just gotta take each race, get the best you can, get the most you can, and that's really all you can do.

Q: Is there any point in this season that you could have done better, things could have worked out better that it could have been a better Chase for you do you think or is it just the way the luck has evolved more or less?

Burton: When I look at our Chase, we've had some good luck, and most of the things that have happened to us from a bad standpoint, I don't consider luck. I think that we broke an engine at Talladega -- that wasn't luck. We did something wrong. We broke a fuel pump, part of the fuel pump cable system the week before that. And I don't consider that luck either. I consider that something that was in our control.

And then we haven't run as well. That's in our control, too. People always forget the good things that happen. Sunday we finished fifth and if that thing would have gone two more laps who knows where we would have finished. We had a tire rub so bad that I don't know how -- we wouldn't have finished fifth I can assure you of that. So that worked out for us.

So we've had some things go for us and we've had some things go against us. At the end of the day, the thing we're not happy about is the way we've run. It hasn't been in the Chase; it was before the Chase. We hadn't run as well as we did the first part of the year. Seemed like when it got away from us we were never able to get it back. So we're still fighting and we're going to go get all we can get.

NASCAR.COM - Burton hopes to get back up to speed in COT, Chase - Oct 30, 2007