Ward Burton: Auto Club 500 preview

FONTANA, Calif. -- Ward Burton will make his 331st NASCAR Nextel Cup Series start when the green flag drops for the Auto Club 500 at California Speedway.

"This race in California is important to this team in a lot of ways. Both NetZero and Haas Automation are based in this area and both will have a ton of people at the speedway watching us and cheering us on. We want to run well wherever we go, but it would be really special for us to have a great finish here in front of all of the people that allow us to race every week.

"California Speedway is a first-class facility and it's a great place to race and a great place for fans to go to enjoy a good race. The track is wide and fast and has a couple of grooves, so if your car isn't handling exactly the way you want it to, you can make some changes on track to get the most out of the car until you can make it better.

"It's also a strategy track sometimes since there aren't usually a ton of cautions and it has turned into a fuel mileage track in the past. You'll depend on your fuel mileage guy a lot more here than you will at a lot of other tracks."

"We took a hit in the points last week with the problem we had with the engine and we need to do whatever it takes to make sure that doesn't happen again. The further we get in the season, the harder it is to rebound points-wise when things like that happen. It's especially important now that we have this new points system in place. We can't let ourselves get too far out of the hunt, we don't have as much time to make up for it as we used to."