JEFF BURTON QUOTES:
Phoenix is a track where you’ve had one of your best runs all season. What are your feelings about returning to PIR?
“I think that the short-track type racing has been the strength for Team Cingular this season, for sure. We ran third at Phoenix and had a very fast car at the end of the race. This is a race we feel very strongly about based on the fact that we did run well there in the spring. A lot has changed since then. I think we are a better team. We feel good about Phoenix. It’s a track where I’ve had a lot of success in the past. We tested there in the spring and it’s a place where we definitely feel like we can have success.”

About your third-place finish earlier this season, a lot of people expected you to get out of the car and jump for joy. But instead, you said with a car of that caliber your expectation is to win.
“When a team is 15th in points and hasn’t won a race, a lot of people expect that team to be really excited when they run third. We certainly should not take it for granted and think that it’s not a good thing, because it’s a very good thing for any team. But, if we start getting really excited that third is good enough, we have a problem. Team Cingular hasn’t gotten into that, we have been realistic about our goals. We’ve been realistic about where we are and we’ve been realistic about how much better we need to be in some areas. I don’t want to be part of a team that gets all pumped up and fired up because we ran third. We need to position ourselves so that we can be pumped up and fired up when we win and when we run third we can look at it and say ‘That was a great race, but what could we have done better?’. That is the attitude and environment that we are going to build.”

Your last victory came at Phoenix in 2000. Are you shocked that it’s been so long between wins for you?
“First of all, I have the utmost respect for how hard it is to win races in the NASCAR Cup Series. So, my answer is yes and no. If you would have said to me ‘It’s going to be four years before you win again’, I would have thought, no way. If you were to say to me ‘It could be four years’, I would say, yes, I understand that. I know I kind of contradict myself a little bit in saying that, but as a competitor you want to believe that there is no way I won’t win in that amount of time. As a guy that understands how hard the sport is, I understand how that can happen. It is a very frustrating thing. Although I will say, no matter what happens to you individually, life will go on for everybody else. Just when you think the entire world is going to end because you think the world revolves around you, you find out really quickly it doesn’t. I think I’ve done a nice job of staying focused. I don’t know how many races it’s been since I’ve won, I just don’t know. Other people do, but they look at books and stats to find out. I don’t pay attention to that, I pay attention to what did we do last week and what are we going to do better this week. That’s how I live my life.”