NASCAR just got a booster shot of class and dignity. Jeff Burton is winning again.
Suddenly atop the Chase for the Nextel Cup standings and out of a nearly five-year slump, his manner and manners remain steady.
In victory he doesn’t do those obnoxious burnouts and doughnuts. He doesn’t move to the beat of the thumping hard-rock bass that NASCAR’s extreme-makeover machine blasts out at the tracks and on television.
The other night, when David Letterman’s writers put absurd one-liners in the mouths of nine Chase contenders for gag shots, the other one, Burton, was actually in character: “I don’t care much for country music or beer.”
To get him worked up outside NASCAR, put him at a Duke basketball game. He’s cerebral enough to have been an alumnus, had he not been laser-focused from age 8 as a racer.
Had life turned differently–say, through Duke law school–he might now, at 39, be pursuing his private dream: running for the Senate from Virginia.
In the months before and after Dale Earnhardt was killed, Burton quietly but firmly led his peers in pushing for NASCAR’s safety revolution.
Maybe it’s just coincidence, but before last weekend’s race at Dover, Del., Burton hadn’t won since that awful season of 2001. And now his comeback is propelled by Earnhardt’s old team, Richard Childress Racing.
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Throughout this season you could see it coming: winning poles and finishing well, Burton was back in the media centers of the NASCAR tracks turning news conferences into professorial reflections as only he can.
By Indianapolis in August, he dominated the race and then fell off at the end. Sunday after Sunday after that, he was almost there. Almost.
It was reminiscent of his youth in NASCAR, when he was mentored by tough old crew chief Buddy Parrot. To paraphrase Parrot at the time, Burton kept getting in position to win, and it was only a matter of time before he broke through.
“It’s funny you mention that,” Burton said a couple of weeks ago, at the brink of breaking through. “I liken our team to the first year I worked with Buddy Parrot.”
The RCR team was nearer and nearer peaking, to complete years of rebuilding from the disaster of Earnhardt’s death.
And when it happened last Sunday, when Burton finally won, did you see it? Were you as overwhelmed as I was with the deluge of decent behavior not seen in NASCAR in years?
After he’d lost 175 straight races through nearly five seasons, you couldn’t have blamed Burton if he’d ripped up the infield grass at Dover with spinning wheels, then clouded the frontstretch grandstands with the acrid tire smoke that has become so banal from NASCAR victors.
But he didn’t, and that was profound.
He drove to the flag stand, accepted the checkered flag and drove around the track clockwise–the opposite direction from racing–the better to salute the crowd in gratitude through the driver’s-side window.
Matt Kenseth, who’d dueled with Burton in the waning laps so fiercely as to make this arguably the most electrifying Dover finish ever, had run out of gas and was stopped at the start-finish line.
Burton stopped, his car facing the opposite direction from Kenseth’s, like you sometimes see two highway patrol cars do in the median. Combatants only moments before, they extended their hands to each other.
I can’t remember such a decent gesture at the end of any event, in any form of motor racing, especially the modern realm of hot-dogging young guns in NASCAR.
Sometimes restraint has more public impact than self-indulgence in pizzazz. Maybe now the burnouts and doughnuts will go out of fashion.
If you want profuse emotion from the Burton family, look at the earnest angst on the face of wife Kim in the pits in the final laps and her joyful weeping at the end. Back in the multiple-win seasons before the dismal streak set in, she was noted for the emotion she put into all of his 17 wins.
And now after the 18th, she’ll surely be a magnet for the live TV cameras, again distracting them from the supermodel girlfriends and cool wives of young guns in the recent seasons.
Then in Victory Lane, when the first two people to greet him were his kids, Kimberle, 11, and Harrison, almost 6, there was nothing phony about it if you know Burton and how much they really mean to his life.
Doubling Burton’s determination Sunday was last week’s television report that his team had been using tricked-up wheels to lower tire pressure and improve handling. That’s an allegation that both the team and NASCAR officials vehemently denied, implying strongly the story had originated with a member of a rival team.
“He ought to be ashamed of himself,” Burton said. “And if his mother knew he did it, she’d be ashamed of him too.”
That’s s-o-o-o Burton. Say it softly, for general audiences, but cut to the bone as surely as if the counterattack had been profane and vicious.
Should Burton win the championship, it would be the biggest comeback, from the deepest doldrums, since Richard Petty’s final title in 1979.
And a Burton reign as NASCAR’s ambassador to the public would have all the class of the King’s, with better grammar for good measure.
Chase for the Cup
Key: M-make; C–Chevrolet; D–Dodge; F–Ford; W–wins
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DRIVER NAME M W PTS
1. Jeff Burton C 1 5,351
2. Jeff Gordon C 2 5,345
3. Matt Kenseth F 4 5,333
3. Denny Hamlin C 2 5,333
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5. Kevin Harvick C 4 5,297
6. Mark Martin F 0 5,276
7. Dale Earnhardt Jr. C 1 5,249
8. Jimmie Johnson C 4 5,215
9. Kasey Kahne D 5 5,169
10. Kyle Busch C 1 5,127
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