Jeff Burton Has Fun as He Competes for the Chase Championship

Jeff Burton cares about winning races and he wants to win a NASCAR Cup championship.

He’s not going to let his desire do either, however, extinguish his enjoyment of the sport. And he recommends others take the same kind of approach.

“We can’t forget that we do this for fun,” Burton said Friday at Kansas Speedway when asked to diagnose the pressure teammate Clint Bowyer must feel while running for championships in both the Cup and Nationwide series. “We are playing a game that we wanted to play when were 7 years old. That’s the way I view it. And having an opportunity to race for championships is a lot better than not having that opportunity. And I think points have a way of taking some of the fun out of the sport because you can’t just run a race and say, ‘OK, that’s done. We’re going to go run the next one.’ They all mean so much.

“So we tend to stress ourselves out about it, but I think it’s important just to remember that we started doing this for fun and we need to keep doing it for fun.”

Burton, who is fourth in the Cup standings and 82 points out of the lead with eight races left in the Chase For The Sprint Cup, doesn’t downplay the stress that comes with competing for a championship. He just tries to keep it in perspective, remembering that doing so is different than not caring.

“That doesn’t mean you don’t try hard and you put a lot of effort in and you’re [not] upset when things don’t go well, because we certainly get that way,” Burton said. “But, you know, what the heck? Try as hard as you can. Ask the people around you to try as hard as you can. Put a 100 percent effort into it, and if you do that and the results are good, then that’s great. If they’re not, then go swing that bat again. That’s really all you can do.”

As for what driver and team Burton believes is most likely to snare this year's title, he says he does believe there is a clear favorite at this point. He does see Roush Fenway Racing’s Greg Biffle, who enters this weekend coming off wins in the first two Chase events at New Hampshire and Dover, as a strong title contender, however.

“They’re a dangerous team,” the Richard Childress Racing driver said. “Every year we have these conversations. Last year it was Clint [Bowyer]. The year before that it was us. The year before that I’m not real sure who it was. I wasn’t in [the Chase] so I wasn’t paying attention. But every year somebody, I don’t want to say comes out of the woods, but surprises people and puts themselves in a position to win when nobody picked them and that’s what [Biffle's team] has done this year. Whether they can do it for eight more weeks or not, I don’t know. They could. They look really strong.

“There’s five mile-and-a-half [tracks] coming up. That’s where I think [Biffle and his team] have been their best is at the big race tracks. But there are a lot of variables. You still have Martinsville coming up. You still have Talladega coming up. A lot of stuff’s going to happen between now and then in the Chase.”