Burton Wins Jiffy Lube 300 In Dramatic Fashion

Jeff Burton's victory in the Jiffy Lube 300 was his fourth of the season and a series best ninth for Ford Motor Company. Chevrolet is second with six wins and Pontiac third with three. In addition, Burton's victory from the 38th starting spot was the biggest come-from-behind effort since Bill Elliott won from that same spot in the 1988 Firecracker 400 at Daytona International Speedway. The furthest back any driver has started and won a NASCAR Winston Cup event came in 1950 when Johnny Mantz won the Southern 500 from 43rd position. Ford now has the top three drivers in the NASCAR Winston Cup standings. Dale Jarrett holds a 240-point lead over second place Jeff Burton while Mark Martin moved into third and trails by 249 points. Ford also holds a 15-point lead over Chevrolet in the race for the manufacturer's championship. Ford has 129 points while Chevrolet has 114 and Pontiac 99.

JEFF BURTON PRESS CONFERENCE "We came into this race pretty concerned is a fair way to say it. We made no less than five changes to the car from yesterday afternoon to this morning. Frank and I wanted to sit down and talk about it for too long and we decided that our first instinct was best and we turned around and walked away from each other yesterday afternoon and just said we made our minds up and that's what we're gonna do and we stuck to our guns. We came a long way this weekend. We weren't very competitive most of the weekend. We were three or four-tenths slower than we needed to be yesterday and I kept telling everyone we were OK, but deep down I knew we weren't. It was just a great job by Frank and this team to turn it around because we were way off. We were fortunate at the end, obviously, with the 20 running out of fuel, but when you start 38th and you go into a race having made five big changes to the car and you're not sure what it's gonna do, you're looking to put yourself in position to win and we did that. This is really big for us to be able to do that overnight and contend for the win late in the race. We were running second and contending for the win and that's what it's all about is putting yourself in position."

ANY NEAR MISSES OUT THERE? YOU HAD A LOT OF TRAFFIC TO GO THROUGH? "Well, I'm terrible at qualifying so I'm used to it. It's part of being with me I guess. The advantage about qualifying poorly is when you do start in the back, you just don't worry about it. You just go do your deal and you try your best not to touch anybody and you hope nobody touches you. I had a few near misses, but nothing major -- nothing any worse than what I had when I was running fifth. The double-wide restarts here are very treacherous. It's real tough to start side-by-side because the guy on the outside wants as much of the inside as he can get. The guy on the inside isn't wanting to get on the apron, so you've got two guys trying to run on a groove and a half and it gets treacherous."

WHAT ABOUT THE LAST SET OF TIRES? "I started whining when we first put them on. It was real loose and I thought if it was loose then it would be really loose in about 50 laps. Several guys got by me because it was loose, but it kept getting better and better and better. Frank and Buddy made a call to make a change to the air pressure and in the first five laps I was whining. I was thinking we made the wrong call, but in 20 laps those things came in and away we went. We ran the 88 down and got back by the 6, which worked real well to help me, and then the 88 when I got to him he worked with me. Then I started to run the 20 down and I ran so hard I think I ran off the tires. We got behind some lapped guys that didn't work with me very nicely and that got us behind. I could run the same speed as he could, but without some help I wouldn't have been able to catch him."

WHY WERE ALL OF THE ROUSH TEAMS OFF THIS WEEKEND AND WHAT TURNED IT AROUND? "I think it was me. The race track was different this time. In the past you didn't have to run fast in the middle of the corner to go fast here. As long as you got off the corner you could run fast. I was not running hard enough. That's the bottom line. When you've had success somewhere you hold on tight to what you've done and I was holding on too tight to what I was doing. When I got ready to qualify, I had figured out by then that you can't run all day in practice and drive too easy, then go and try to run too hard because you haven't set the car up to do that. Whether it was the spoilers, or different pavement with no sealer, I don't know what was different but guys were running real fast and I was sitting there running like we would have run last year. I just wasn't running fast enough. It was me, it wasn't the car."

WHEN DID YOU THINK YOU COULD DRIVE IT TO THE FRONT? "When I sat in that car this afternoon I had confidence it would go forward. I didn't know how far forward it would go, but I thought it would go forward. It got better every single time. The first run we were probably the 15th best car, the next run we were maybe the 10th best, the next run we were the fifth-best car. The last run we were at least no worse than the second-best car. We gained on it all day long. We'd take off slow, but we would generally come back on them. That's how we've always had success here. We'd give up some speed early to make it up later. On the first run we got by a lot of cars and I felt like with as many changes as we made, we could fine tune it and get it better from there. I had a lot of optimism when the first caution came out that we could make some changes and make it better."

THREE STRAIGHT WINS, WHY ARE YOU SUCCESSFUL? "This is a great race team. This team is prepared to come to win. Buddy Parrott provides us leadership we need and Jack Roush provides us the tools and pieces we need. Frank Stoddard provides us with chassis knowledge and leadership and I try to do my part. I think we all do our part really well and we do it real well together. Why we do it better here than other places, I don't know. You can't say we dominated this race, that's for sure, we had some good fortune."

WHAT WAS HAPPENING OUT THERE? "From my seat there's never a whole lot of give and take. You give a shot to somebody and take their spot. That's what I generally took. It's a narrow race track. It looks wide and the corners are real wide, but there's only a certain amount of the corner you can use. I saw the Bobby Labonte wreck. There was a car on the outside and, if your car doesn't do what you expect it to do and you're on the bottom, you're gonna hit the guy on the outside. If you hit him just right nothing happens, but if you hit him as your halfway spinning out then bad things happen. I saw that happen a lot. Fortunately, I wasn't the guy that was hitting somebody. It's a slippery race track. On restarts it's hard to get going. We run faster here on the 15th lap than we do on the third lap after the restart. Most places aren't like that. During that time you're really having to drive the car."