As I’m sure you read three weeks ago, in the year 2000, Jeff Burton led all 300 laps to win the Dura Lube 300 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway.
In a career that saw the South Boston, Va. native win 21 NASCAR Cup Series races, including the Southern 500 and two Coca-Cola 600s, the most recent flag-to-flag win in the Cup Series tends to be the story most often repeated whenever the NBC analyst’s name is brought up in 2022.
But let us not forget the story of how Burton used a move many thought would be a career downgrade to battle back from the precipice of winless, unsponsored anonymity, earning a trio of top-10 points finishes and the final four wins of his Cup Series career in a true testament to the maturity and professionalism of the veteran wheelman.
After a winless first campaign behind the wheel of Jack Roush’s No. 99 Exide Batteries Ford, Burton’s first career win came in Texas Motor Speedway’s inaugural Cup race in April 1997. With the victory, Burton became the first driver other than Mark Martin to win a Cup race for Jack Roush, setting in motion the pieces that would result in Roush Racing becoming a five-car megateam by 2005.
.@FordPerformance and Roush Racing had a stellar regular season in 2005, putting all five of their cars in the Playoffs (then known as “The Chase for the Nextel Cup” and limited to 10 cars/drivers)!#RoushYates19Years | #RoushYatesEngines | #RoushRacing | @RFKRacing pic.twitter.com/RlGlOmdXHY
— Roush Yates Engines (@roushyates) January 10, 2022
Unfortunately for Burton, that would happen without him.
While he won 17 races for Roush between 1997 and 2001 (finishing top-five in points four years out of five) by 2003 things looked a lot different. Though he ended up a still-respectable 12th in the standings, he had scored a grand total of three top fives, a far cry from his career-high of 18 just four years earlier, and was nursing a winless streak dating back to Oct. 2001.
“We were the worst team [at Roush],” said Burton in a 2020 appearance on the Scene Vault podcast. “[We] just couldn’t seem to get the ship righted.”
While Matt Kenseth, Kurt Busch and Greg Biffle emerged as a new generation of winning Roush drivers, joining Martin (the ageless wonder) as the face of Ford’s flagship team, Burton took a nosedive.
The No. 99 team lost primary sponsor CITGO before the start of 2004, leaving Roush to piece together backers for much of that year. SKF, Hot Wheels and Duke…
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