Jeff Burton finding his way to winner’s circle – NASCAR news
Jeff Burton rode ahead for bunch of laps in 2010 season but could not manage to lead the winning ones.
“That’s the one thing that was disappointing about [2010],” the Richard Childress Racing driver said. “I can go back and look at my career, and there aren’t many [wins] that got away from me. You know what I mean? I haven’t put myself in position as
many times as I’d like to but I haven’t had many get away from me. This [past] year it just seemed like we couldn’t corral them up.”
2010 marked his second consecutive winless season in NASCAR Sprint Cup Series. Teammates visiting winner’s area made this look embarrassing as Burton expressed.
Burton headed 140 laps at Martinsville in the spring finishing lame 20th. He led 89 laps at Loudon for finishing fairly 12th. At Talladega, he led for 28 laps, where mostly everyone gets to lead ahead but still concluded on 32nd place.
In fall on his return to Martinsville, he led 134 laps ending in ninth position.
“Really you just have to go back and look at every race individually to understand what went wrong,” Burton, who finished 12th in the points battle, said. “We didn’t consistently do one thing wrong, we just had a collection of things. And sometimes
there was nothing we could have done.”
Working in off-season also reflects the previous performance. However, Burton has worked hard to sort out the rights and wrongs held last season.
Burton carries 21-race winnings in Cup, but a longer stretch mark of 77 winless races into 2011 season. Last win he bagged dates back in fall of 2008 at Charlotte.
“The last five or six races, we didn’t have the speed,” he says. “The first two or three races in the Chase we ran really well and only got one good finish out of it because of fuel mileage and just [other] stuff.
Equally important, he says, is “minimizing mistakes.” And that could be a bad pit stop, a bad chassis decision or a mistake made by the driver on the track.
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