Last week at Talladega Jeff Burton came back from three laps down to take the lead, this past weekend in Richmond the driver of the No. 31 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet overcame a spin and contact with the wall to finish third. While others might have simply cashed in their chips and given up, Burton and his team refuse to give in.

“Well, I mean, you can't worry about what's happening,” Burton explained. “You just got to worry about going to try to make something happen.  When things aren't good, you got to put your head down and go.  You know, that's one thing that our team is really good at, is we're very resilient, we never quit.”

After starting Saturday night’s Russ Friedman 400 from the sixth-spot, Burton fell out of the top-10 early in the going and rode in the top-15 for much of the event. Racing hard with Dale Earnhardt Jr. for position, Burton’s night appeared to take a turn for the worse when contact between the two sent the No. 31 spinning into the outside wall in Turn 3.

“We were both kind of struggling,” Burton said of the incident. “I was on the [outside].  I had gotten underneath him.  He was pretty loose.  Then I got loose.  He got back underneath me.  We drove into three.  He just got loose and came up the track.  I spun people out like that before.  Just a racing incident.  He was struggling.  Looked really loose getting in the corner.”

Instead of giving up and riding around the mid-pack, Burton’s crew went to work making the minor repairs necessary to keep him in contention. By Lap 300 he had broken back into the top-10 and as the laps wound down, Burton hooked up with Tony Stewart and charged towards the front on newer tires.

On the final restart with thirty-nine laps to go, Stewart and Burton took the green in ninth and tenth respectively. With newer tires than many of those ahead, the two drivers worked together as they began to pick their way into the top-5. As Kyle Busch drove away from the rest of the field, Burton and Stewart cleared the rest of the top-5 on Lap 373 and set their sights on the lead.

With fifteen laps remaining, Busch had opened up over a three-second lead over Stewart in second-place and Burton behind him in third. The two cars began to close in on the leader, whittling the lead down to 2.7 seconds with ten to go, but it became clear the battle would be for second. Giving up their efforts to catch the No. 18, Burton and Stewart went to racing amongst themselves.

Burton never could get back around Stewart and was happy to come home third. The top-5 finish bumped the Virginia-native up two spots in series standings to seventh, 184 points out of the lead.

“Every now and then we might be the fastest car, but we're not normally the fastest car,” Burton admitted. “We chisel finishes out.  We find a way to finish sixth and eighth and ninth.  That's not great, but that's our strength.  We keep trying to find the speed to put with that.  When we do, we'll be pretty dangerous.

“But, you know, we're pretty resilient and we just go fight,” he went on to say. “I take a lot of pride in trying to make something happen.  I still say, and Tony will probably agree with me, that the people that finish seventh with a 15th place car, that's who did the best job.  It's not necessarily the guy in Victory Lane every week.  It's the guy that found a way to make something out of something that didn't look good.”

For the past two weeks Jeff Burton has been able to do just that – take a situation that did not look good at all and wound up making something happen. The class of the RCR fleet, this veteran driver has continued to show he is a threat each week, and through his performances at Talladega and Richmond has shown he can overcome even the worse odds to contend for the win.

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