Jeff Burton, Richard Childress Racing optimistic for Daytona 500 after strong Speedweeks
Kevin Harvick crosses the finish line with Jimmie Johnson in the Gatorade Duels at Daytona Thursday. Harvick is one of the favorites to win the Daytona 500. // Jim Fluharty, NASCAR Illustrated
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – When he looked at the leaderboard after Sprint Cup practice at Daytona International Speedway Saturday, Jeff Burton couldn’t help but flash a slight grin.
After pacing the final practice before Sunday’s Daytona 500, Burton is optimistic. Cautiously optimistic.
And that’s a feeling Burton and his Richard Childress Racing teammates haven’t felt much in the past year.
“I feel really good,” Burton said. “We’ve been fast in every practice, we’ve run in the front in both races we were in. We finished horrible in both of them, but we ran in the front and we showed the speed to be able to run in the front.
“I’m optimistic about what we can do.”
After placing three drivers in the Chase For The Sprint Cup in 2007 and 2008, RCR had one of its worst seasons ever in 2009.
Burton and teammates Clint Bowyer and Kevin Harvick all missed the Chase and none of them won a race. It wasn’t until the final 10 races of the season that the RCR cars were competitive at all, leading to big changes and a lot of work during the offseason.
Burton has a new crew chief in Todd Berrier; Scott Miller, his former crew chief, is now the team’s director of competition, and the team’s fourth team, which featured driver Casey Mears last year, is gone, making RCR a three-car operation once again.
Once one of the sport’s most successful organizations, the focus in the offseason has been returning RCR to elite status.
They’re off to a good start.
Harvick, who won the 2007 Daytona 500, won the Budweiser Shootout for the second straight year last week and finished second by inches to Jimmie Johnson in his Gatorade Duel race Thursday.
Bowyer, who pushed Harvick to the front on Thursday, finished fourth.
Burton ran at the front until he blew a tire and hit the wall, forcing him to go to a backup car for Sunday’s race.
Then, on Saturday, in final preparations for the Daytona 500, Burton topped the speed chart with Harvick second.
Team owner Richard Childress had a smile on his face afterwards as he huddled with Burton’s team.
“I think our cars are right there,” Childress said. “I think everybody did their homework and we came down here loaded. All we can do, you’ve got to have luck to go along with it to win this race.”
After his performance in the two races he has run so far – first and second – Harvick may be the favorite on Sunday.
“Kevin is as focused as I have ever seen him focused on anything, so I really feel good about the 500,” Childress said. “His car is really fast.”
"I've felt good about our cars all week," Harvick said. "We've had a chance to win every chance we've been in so far, and tomorrow is not going to be any different."
Burton is among the group of favorites, too, after Saturday’s practice, but he warns that practice and the previous races mean very little when it comes to a 500-mile race.
“I don’t know if there is a favorite in this race, to be perfectly honest,” Burton said. “I think there are some people you can pull out who look really good. I wouldn’t say Kevin was the favorite going into last week’s race. Anything can happen.”
Burton’s biggest concern is tire problems that have plagued him all week. He blew a tire in Thursday’s qualifying race, and then had more tire problems in practice on Saturday.
“We’re real confused with it,” Burton said. “We got tight the other day and we thought we hurt a tire because we were too tight. We freed it up a lot today and now I am loose, really loose, and we still hurt a right-front tire. So we are real concerned about it.”
Then there’s the matter of devising a winning strategy, which is practically impossible at Daytona due to the intricacies of the draft and a rules package that allows drivers to gain ground quickly.
There will be plenty of aggressive bump-drafting with drivers pushing each other through the field. Who winds up at the front at the end will depend on who gets drafting help and who doesn’t.
Drivers making a charge at the end – Harvick in 2007 and Ryan Newman in 2008 – won two of the past three Daytona 500s.
With larger restrictor plates and more horsepower, the leader on the final lap might be a sitting duck again this year.
“The race has been won the last few years by making runs from pretty far back,” Burton says. “The way these cars pull up and the way other cars affect them next to them, I’m not sure where you want to be. I think you’ve got to be in the top five or six unless things get bottled up and something odd happens.”
Burton, 42, has 21 career victories, including the Coca-Cola 600 (twice) at Charlotte Motor Speedway and the Southern 500 at historic Darlington Raceway.
Winning the Daytona 500 would be his greatest accomplishment.
“It would mean a lot,” he said. “I love this sport and I have a lot of respect for the past, and this race is a lot of what has put NASCAR on the map.
“I’ve been lucky to win some big races. The two things that I haven’t been able to accomplish that really mean a great deal to me are the Daytona 500 and a championship. This is it, we’re here.”
That he is considered one of the favorites entering the race, along with Harvick and Bowyer, says a lot about the progress RCR has made in the past year.
“It was really important for all of our cars to come down here and run good,” Childress says. “We really started to turn it around with seven or eight races to go last year. We were really competitive and strong. It just shows all the hard work everybody has put in.”
