JEFF BURTON QUOTES:
Chicagoland Speedway and Kansas Speedway look just alike, but are they?
“They really are different. The race tracks, from the outside looking at them, look exactly the same. But, every track has its own unique characteristics and these two tracks have their own. From what I remember, there are now multiple grooves at Chicagoland, so you can run a little bit higher, you don’t have to run right on the bottom of the track. But, in qualifying, the bottom is definitely the way to go.”

Team Cingular has quite a few test sessions planned for the next couple weeks, has your testing schedule changed to try to make it into the Chase for the Championship?
“Well, really all along we tried to hold tests back to concentrate on the last 12 to 15 races. I believe the way we have it set up, we will test for about half of the last 10 races, but that was our plan all along. We hoped to be a little closer in points to be able to capitalize on that, but actually being farther behind in points than we want to be makes testing that much more important. We’ve got to have good tests and take advantage of them so we can go back and use that information wisely for the race.”

You have scheduled a test at New Hampshire where you have had success in the past and won at the track. What is the reason you would choose to test there?
“We ran really well at Richmond and really well at Phoenix and thought we had a good chance to win at both places. Those tracks are similar to Loudon, so we want to go test there to try to take the next step. We just think if we can go test at Loudon and make it that much better from what we had at Phoenix and Richmond, then we’ll stand a really good chance of making good progress. We’re going to test Indy, Loudon, Watkins Glen and maybe California and then we’ll kind of hold back the last two test sessions.”

So why test Watkins Glen, does the recent race at Infineon not transfer over well enough?
“For us, we think that some tracks offer more benefit to testing than others, so we try to test at tracks where we think we can really use that information. We know at Watkins Glen that just getting me on the track will be good for us. I’ve run really well at Watkins Glen the last four to five years. I’ve been in the top five quite a bit and in the top 10 a lot along with having a good chance to win some races. In addition, this team has run really well at Watkins Glen, so we’re going to try to put those two things together. We think we learned a lot at Infineon. We raced really well there, but we were off just a little bit. We need to go to the test at Watkins Glen to try to find a little bit of speed, which will hopefully make qualifying a little bit better since qualifying is really important. As you saw at Infineon, fuel mileage is also huge at road courses, so we’ll work on that at the test also. So, there are a lot of good reasons for us to test Watkins Glen.”

What will it take for Team Cingular to make the Chase for the Championship?
“We’ve just got to finish races well. We could over analyze it, but at the end of the day what we have to do is start knocking off top-10 and top-five finishes and not have bad races. That’s as simple as it gets.”