Starting on the outside of the front row in the TUMS QuikPak 500, Jeff Burton fell back to 17th by the time that the race had ended. The spoiler of the race came when he was penalized for a being outside of his stall on pit road.

“It was just bad timing, really,” Burton said. “Just one of those things that happens on pit road, especially a small pit road. We were coming on and he [Jeff Gordon] was leaving. He didn’t do anything wrong, I didn’t do anything wrong. I was just trying to stop when he was coming out, and when I did I was so far down pit road, it was hard to get position back in the box.

“Bad break. The official didn’t do anything wrong. It is hard to make everything happen that quickly. We needed to run a little bit better than we did today, but we had a bad break there and we will move on.”

The finish knocked him down one spot in the Chase Standings 152 points behind Jimmie Johnson.

“I fully expected to come here and the No. 48 [of Johnson] to run well," Burton noted. "If it surprises anybody that the No. 48 ran well at Martinsville, they are crazy. It doesn’t surprise me one bit. This is their strongest race track of every place we run. They run better here than anyone and they run well at a lot of places. I don’t view this as being over.”