JEFF BURTON QUOTES:
With running in such close quarters at Talladega Superspeedway everyone seems to be waiting on ‘The Big One’ to happen. Why are the wrecks bigger at that track?
“The thing about Talladega isn’t the racetrack, it’s all the cars. You are going to be in a pack of 35 to 40 cars all day long. You have to be very patient, take your time and stay there. The corners are wide enough to run three-wide. You can run four-wide for sure, but three-wide is comfortable and four-wide is pushing it. You’ll see a lot of bump drafting. If done properly it’s no problem, but if done wrong it can cause the big wreck. I’ve used this analogy of Tony Stewart. I think he was running fifth at the time and got up in the air and landed on his teammate’s car that was running 20th. There’s something wrong with that situation. Well, there’s nothing you can do about it with packs that big, other than not cause the wrecks. If nobody causes the wreck, then the wreck never happens. Everybody blames the wrecks, saying ‘that’s just Talladega’. It’s just Talladega and you’re running 20th and the fifth-place guy wrecks and you have no place to go. It’s not ‘just Talladega’ for the guy that spun the fifth-place guy out. That’s just a mistake. If nobody starts the wreck we never have them. These cars don’t wreck themselves.”

What is your mindset going into Talladega?
“You certainly go into the race with the mindset of ‘let’s miss the big wreck’. You have to think the big wreck is coming. If you don’t think the big wreck is coming, you haven’t been watching racing very much. Everyone says we’re waiting on the big one. Well, yes because the big one always happens. All you can do is put yourself in position to run the best you can run. If the wreck happens in front of you, it happens in front of you. You have to just do your best not to cause the wreck.”

Fans love watching restrictor plate races -- what is it like from the driver’s seat?
“From a driver’s seat, there are so many wrecks that don’t happen. I don’t think the fans or even NASCAR has an appreciation for how many big wrecks are avoided because somebody just lifted at the right time or someone got himself in a hole and said to himself ‘Oh, I don’t really need to be here’ and he backs off. I’m telling you it happens so many times. So when it does happen, for us, it’s no big surprise because we’ve been watching it for 100 laps and we’re just sitting there waiting for it. So at some point someone doesn’t lift or doesn’t know they need to lift and it all goes away.”

How big of an impact will Talladega be on The Chase for the Championship?
“This race will have a huge impact in The Chase for the Championship. You cannot finish 43rd in this race and still win the championship. Because there are multi-car wrecks at Talladega, ‘Missing the Big One’ is something you’ll hear all the guys in the Chase talk about. They are not going to talk about winning this race… they are going to talk about surviving this race.