Around the Track: Michigan

Michigan International Speedway is the prototype for the wide, fast ovals that Jeff Burton and the rest of the Nextel Cup Series' competitors face during the season -- and specifically this weekend in Sunday's Batman Begins 400.

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Michigan is a two-mile oval with 18-degree banking in its four turns and 12-degree banking through the trioval on its 3,600-foot frontstretch.

Michigan is a track that I think most drivers really like because it has a lot of options.

You can run on the very bottom, you can run in the middle, you can run the top. It's a track that is really, really fun to drive on.

Fuel mileage does seem to often come into play there because it seems like we have a lot of green flag runs. I don't know why, but it seems like there are not as many cautions at Michigan as at other racetracks.

I think that's why it falls into play with a lot of green flag pit stops and a lot of fuel mileage races, but it's a track that I really enjoy, it's fairly smooth with multiple grooves and it has a lot of options for the drivers.

The first thing you've got to do when you make a qualifying lap is to figure out where you want to run on the track, because there's a lot of places you can run and still go fast.

Michigan is a place that, for some reason even though it's a fast racetrack, it doesn't feel as fast as some racetracks.

It's real important to be able to get into the corners fairly far with the throttle still on, and then pick the throttle back up really, really quickly.

You have to use every bit of the racetrack that you can, getting off of the corners, especially Turn 2.

It seems to me like the qualifying line has moved lower in the last few years so you tend to run closer to the bottom than we used to.

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But it's not like an Atlanta or a Charlotte, where you feel like you're just throwing it all out there and just hope to come back. It's much more calm than that.

Michigan has such long corners, but when you talk about getting in deeper or getting back on the throttle sooner, I think it's important to do both.

The guys that are going to run well are going to be able to drive in and get on the throttle quick.

When you start having to make sacrifices with what you can and can't do with your car compared to other people, that's when you can't run as fast as other people.

It's important certainly to be on the throttle as much as you can, but if you had to give me a choice I'd rather be on the throttle earlier getting off the corner rather than driving in deeper, to build momentum for off the corner.

But to run well there you have to be able to do both.

The 2005 specifications are going to mean very little at Michigan. The biggest thing is the impound procedure. We'll qualify and race in our race setups, and that's the biggest effect of the rules.

Really, we've adapted and adjusted to the short spoiler and the new tires and now it's not even an issue.

If the media didn't ask questions about the short spoilers, I don't think anyone would even know that we had short spoilers any more.

We've just gotten used to it and we've built our cars accordingly and to me it's just not that much of a big deal.

When the race starts, we'll know pretty quickly if we've hit it or missed it on our setups.

Michigan is a track where, when they drop the green flag, the fast cars immediately go fast because they've got a place to run.

At some racetracks you've got a fast car that's running 20th because he can't really pass or get up to where he needs to go.

But at Michigan there are so many options and so many places to pass that you'll know pretty quickly where you are.

Because you might have green flag runs, you're not going to have many chances to make adjustments.

When you start having to make sacrifices under green, by slowing your spit stops down making adjustments that magnifies the deficiency in speed that you have.

If your pit stop takes two seconds longer when people are out there running 180 miles an hour, two seconds is a lot of track position.

So you need to be good and if you're going to make adjustments, you need to try to make them under caution because you might lose a couple positions but you won't lose all those seconds.

Credit: Autostock

It's real important to have a good handling car -- that's the most important thing.

Michigan is a track where pit road is awesome. It's really wide with no real problems there.

Getting onto pit road is a little bit of an issue just because the speed is so high on the racetrack that it's hard to get slowed down to the pit road speed of 55 miles an hour.

It's a good exit that's really wide and I think it's one of the best pit roads we have on the circuit, for sure.

When it comes down to the end of the race, when we look at what's been working, it's going to be four tires. You can certainly do that, but it depends on the length of the last run.

If you have 10 laps versus 30 laps, that's going to make the difference in what you're going to do.

But the way the new generation tire wears out and the speed that falls off of them, you're most likely going to want to put on four tires.

But a lot of that is predicated on what everybody else does. If everybody comes on pit road with 15 to go and they do two, and you're going to do four -- you've got six seconds that you're going to have to make up somewhere.

So a lot of those decisions are predicated on what your competition does.

Michigan is close to Detroit and close to the manufacturers' home bases, so we have a lot of visitors and a lot of people from the manufacturers that come.

There's also a lot of corporate involvement from the Detroit area, because a lot of our sponsors are based there.

It's one of those races that we're really not in Detroit by any means, but it's close enough that everybody thinks we are and that's the race that a lot of people that are in the Detroit area pick to go to because it's convenient.

A lot of corporations send people there and it seems like we have a lot of hospitality events at Michigan.

So I think it's one of the better-attended corporate racetracks that we do go to. All of the manufacturers send people there, and certainly a lot of the sponsors do, too.

Jeff Burton, driver of the No. 31 Cingular Chevrolet, will take fans Around the Track each race week during the 2005 Nextel Cup season.