JEFF BURTON QUOTES:
California’s fall race starts during the day and runs into the night. What type of changes will you see?
“California is a fairly slick race track. It’s not a track with a tremendous amount of grip. What will end up happening is you’ll slide around a little bit during the day, then when it gets darker and the track cools down, there will be more grip. That will make your car a little bit tighter or it will make it drive a little better, depending on your situation. If you’re good during the day, it might hurt it and get too tight at night. But, if your set up isn’t so good during the day, it might transfer up and be really good at night.”

You’ve been talking lately about the changes that have been on going at RCR. Where do you feel like your California program is at right now?
“Well, it’s the thing that we need the most work on and it’s the thing in which we’ve put the most amount of effort. We’ve been working on the bodies, some suspension components and on the set ups. I am looking forward to getting out there and evaluating our progress. We feel like we’ve made improvements, but I know everybody else has too. I feel good and pretty confident about it. I think we’ll be better at California than we were in the spring, but time will tell.”

Has the information exchanging process with the other RCR teams been working well?
“It has been working well. In the spring we were on such different programs as far as aero and chassis set up. We really weren’t that close. But, this time all three teams will go to California on much closer docks than we were in the spring. I think those things are really helping.”

California is part of the ‘New NASCAR’, with it being in the LA market, what would a win at California mean?
“Where we are right now, we just need to win and where we win has little impact. We need to get ourselves where we are knocking on the door more often and getting ourselves in the top-10 more often so that we can win races. Now, if you said to me ‘If you win five races, which five would they be?’, California may or may not be in there. Personally, it probably wouldn’t be, I would say Daytona, Indy, Darlington, places that are richer in history. But, a win at California pays the same amount of points as any other race track. It’s actually a beautiful facility and a great market for our sponsors and for our fans. For me personally, I just want to win and I’m not going to be picky about where that win comes.”

Coming into the final stretch of going into the cut off for the Chase, what do you think teammates and potentially team orders will play?
“I don’t think that you see team orders in Cup racing very often. There’s a lot made about team orders in other series, but if you look at how those programs are run, there’s one sponsor for two cars. There is a two-team program with one sponsor which are run much closer than we do in NASCAR. If Richard Childress got on the radio and said ‘Jeff, let Kevin Harvick win’, he would demoralize this team. This team would say I drive for a guy who won’t let this team compete. He wouldn’t have success in hiring people and keeping people and keeping sponsors. Although we operate together, we operate much more individually than they do in Formula One. The opportunity for team orders is much less likely here than they are in other series. In Evernham’s case, he has a little different deal. He has one sponsor for two cars, but it’s different, he doesn’t have that pressure from the sponsors. Over here, there is a tremendous amount of pressure to compete from all of our sponsors, so it wouldn’t be fair to Cingular Wireless, GM Goodwrench or Jack Daniel’s to take away from one of those teams to help the other.”