Jeff Burton was once considered a future NASCAR superstar while winning seventeen races in a five-year span. But ever since his last win at Phoenix in the fall of 2001, Burton has been stuck in a long-standing winless drought. Now that he has turned over a new leaf at Richard Childress Racing, Burton seems to be reviving his once promising career.
After winning the Bud Pole Award for the Daytona 500 last month, you could just sense that NASCAR driver Jeff Burton was on the threshold of a career revival. Even though his Daytona 500 results were not considered optimum, he continued his resurgence by finishing fifth at California and seventh at Las Vegas. And just to put an exclamation on his 'I'm Baaaack' campaign, Burton won the Busch Series Nicorette 300 at Atlanta on Saturday. Heading into the Golden Corral 500, Burton is a dark horse no more.
This career resurgence is a long time coming for Burton who's most recent victory was at Phoenix in the fall of 2001. Since Burton's last win, his career has abided a downward spiral that many feel has been correlated with the rise of the 'young guns'.
Many new-school fans may not remember, but only eight or nine short years ago, Jeff Burton was identified as a championship waiting to happen. He was a 'young gun' himself when he was a rookie back in 1994 as he was only 26 year old. Burton drove for the underfunded Stovolla Brothers and managed to conquer Rookie of the Year honors. Two years later, the South Boston, Virginia native joined Mark Martin and Ted Musgrave in the Roush Racing camp and was handed the keys to the black and pink #99 Exide Batteries Ford. For the next five years, Burton was a perennial championship contender as all of his seventeen career victories transpired in that time-span. Only Jeff Gordon with 39 wins and Dale Jarrett with 20 wins were more victorious from 1997 to 2001. In September of 2000 at New Hampshire, Burton would lead the race wire to wire as he paced all 300 laps. In fact, many analysts projected Burton to win the 2002 Cup championship.
Instead, Burton's career began to waver as the new faces of NASCAR such as Dale Earnhardt Jr, Ryan Newman, Jimmie Johnson, and Kurt Busch began to dominate the headlines. By 2004, Burton and the #99 team were without established sponsorship and his future with Roush Racing became weighed-down with dubiousness. His unpatterned white cars were often confounded with those of the so-called field fillers such as Kirk Shelmerdine, Andy Belmont, and Stanton Barrett. The once promising career of Burton was considered by many as over and done with.
In August of 2004, Burton and Jack Roush mutually agreed to dissolve their eight year coalition and go their separate ways. Burton became affiliated with the floundering Richard Childress Racing organization while Roush hired Carl Edwards, a young hotshot from the Craftsman Truck Series, who was considered as more marketable. Suddenly, Roush's phone began ringing with potential sponsorships on the other end.
In 2005, the entire RCR organization struggled while Burton's successor Edwards became the next 'big thing' in NASCAR, as he would win four races and contend for the Nextel Cup championship. There appeared to be no light at the end of the tunnel for Burton, but behind the scenes, Richard Childress began to devise a plan to enhance his engine program. He began to make wholesale changes within the organization while re-assigning key employees.
So far in 2006, the changes that Childress has implemented is paying dividends, and Burton is back to where he was in 1996, bound for a breakthrough.
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