The odds are long that Harrison Burton can advance over the next three weeks in the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs but they were long that he would be here in the first place.
From that standpoint, the Wood Brothers No. 21 team are playing with figurative house money. So, for at least the next three weeks, they are going to just fucking race. That’s a slogan crew chief Jeremy Bullins has for anytime there is a lot of noise and he just wants to simplify it.
Just fucking race.
Burton got hats made for the team with the letters ‘JFR’ on it.
“He said that a lot at the beginning of the year anytime things got over-complicated and when people got worried about this, that or the other,” Burton said. “And at the end of the day, you just have to go race. So, I was like, ‘okay, going to make that into a hat,’ and our whole team has them.”
Burton was 34th in the standings two weeks ago, having been told that he wouldn’t be back next season, and that left just one thing to go do — just fucking race. He won at Daytona and now will finish no worse than 16th in the standings with a non-zero chance to advance into the Round of 16 after Atlanta, Watkins Glen and Bristol.
“We just want to make the most of this opportunity,” Burton said. “What we’ve done from the beginning of the year to mow, it doesn’t matter.
“What matters is that we are tied for 12th, right on the cut line to make the next round, and we’re going to a wild card race in Atlanta, not too different than Daytona. We’re going to Watkins Glen, which is a road course race and we’re on a wild card tire compound, and then Bristol, a third wild card race.
“I want to go into these races, prepared and ready to go, and like we belong because we do. I won our way in. We played the rules and won a race to get in and now we’re going to make the most of it.”
Burton says he expects a little bit more data and information from Ford Performance since they are in the playoffs. He knows the Team Penske cars are the priority because they have won the past two championships but it’s also true that his car is prepared in the same shop next to the ones driven by Ryan Blaney, Joey Logano and Austin Cindric.
“Last year, we had a Ford meeting and it was like, ‘what can we do to help the 12 and 22,’ and now hopefully we can be on the other side of it because we’re in there with them,” Burton said. “I feel like, throughout my career, our team has done a good job of being a team player and helping people when the time is right.
“Now we might need the help and I hope that what we’ve given comes our way too.
“It’s just complicated because everyone is racing their own race too, and makes it hard to ask for help, and you don’t want to be treated different but you hope you get the respect back that you’ve put in over the past.”
Burton is also getting phone calls every day about various opportunities for next season and hasn’t made any decisions yet. For now, he wants to focus on these next three races, finding some way to do what he did last month, which is advance.
To do that, he’s just going to go fucking race.
