JEFF BURTON QUOTES:
On Dover.
“Dover is a track with a tremendous amount of grip, but it’s a tough race track. You feel every seam of the concrete. Even though it’s a one-mile track, it’s still very tight. You can run right on the bottom of the race track, or you can run two grooves up. I like running on the bottom. It’s an interesting race track because there is so much room in the corners and none on the straightaways. Normally, it’s the other way around. If a problem happens coming off the corner, there’s no place to go. You just kind of hope you’re in the right place at the right time. Really, it’s a weird race track where the corners are so big that if you have a problem getting in the corner, you kind of have some room to maneuver. But if it’s on the straightaway, you are in trouble. If you get spun there or you spin there, you’re going to hit something. Very rarely does somebody get by without hitting something. You hit hard at Dover, too. You don’t just do a little fender damage … you pretty much put it on the trailer after wrecking at Dover.”

Talk about your first race at Dover this season.
“We finished 12th and ran pretty decent. We were just a little bit behind the guys who were really fast. We ran a totally different setup than what we are going to Dover with for this race. The 29 went to Dover to test and thought they had some success, so we decided to follow that program. They didn’t have a very good weekend, but we ended up making something of it. It wasn’t quite what we wanted, so we’ll go back this time with quite a bit different setup. We’re going to Charlotte (Lowe’s) to test the week heading into Dover, so I really think that will help us get ready for Dover.”

With the final ten races being about building for next year for Team Cingular, how close do you feel you are to getting to the top of the hill where it gets really good?
“That’s a good question. For the last ten races we have four tests remaining, so we’ll use those effectively. Our effort is about running well this year and next year. We’re not just giving up on this season. We can still do a lot of good things this season. We have a lot of good tracks coming up for us. There are a lot of mile-and-a-half tracks in the last part of the season, so it gives us a chance to focus on those and hopefully get that program right for next year. I don’t know how far away we are, but we are making a lot of changes and doing things differently. It feels right, but the results are what matter. I know that our aero program is a lot better than it was when we started the year. We’ve just improved in a lot of areas. Like I said, results are the only thing that matters, but at the end of the day you have to look back and see how we were running at the tracks and what were we doing. It’s definite that we have run better than we have finished in a bunch of cases. We just need to put it all together.”

Would it be a boost for the team to score more points than some teams in The Chase over the final ten races?
“Yes, because we would be succeeding. The more points we can score, the better we are doing as a team. Anytime you can end the year on a positive note, I think that’s a good thing.”