Around the Track: Michigan

Michigan International Speedway in 2005 is one of the critical races in the countdown to the Chase for the Nextel Cup, as only three races remain before the cutoff after Sunday's GFS Marketplace 400.

In his latest edition of Cingular's "Around the Track," Jeff Burton talks about Nextel Cup's 36th year of twice annual visits to the "Irish Hills" section of Michigan.

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There is carryover at Michigan from June to August, for sure. The track is a little bit different because the track is normally hotter, the second time, but I think if you run well there in the spring, you can expect a similar set-up to work.

Pocono seems a little bit less like that, but at Michigan; the difference between the first race and the second race is that everybody's been working.

So the guy that may have had the best car in the spring, his car may be every bit as good as it was, but everybody else's is better.

There have been a lot of people making improvements between the first Michigan and the second, in the effort to pump up their competitiveness, so I think that's the biggest difference.

I'm not sure it's so much the racetrack being different as it is the competition trying to get better.

Adjusting for a slipperier racetrack, due to the heat, is one thing we have to work on. We need more grip. The more downforce we can make, and the more mechanical grip we can make and keep a good balance -- those are the things we're looking to do.

We're looking to make our car turn very well, because the better the car turns, the better chance we'll have of succeeding at Michigan. So front-end grip is what we're really looking for.

We're on a streak of running well at Michigan, and we have one pole there, but that doesn't matter.

When I win a race and I go back to that racetrack, I'm not assuming we're going to win again. Every weekend is a new event, and every single time you get in the racecar you have to expect the unexpected.

Every time you go to Michigan you've got to expect it to be different than it was the time before. This sport doesn't allow you the opportunity to get complacent.

Situations change, tires change, cars change, the chassis change, philosophies on how to set the cars up change -- there are a lot of changes going on all the time and there is no opportunity to become complacent.

Even if you were a lazy person, there's still no opportunity to become complacent.

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Even though Michigan is in the middle of the countdown to the Chase for the Nextel Cup, we have not tested there.

We finished 11th or 12th there in the spring (11th), but we thought we ran much better than that. It was a track we chose not to test at because we thought we had some success there.

I hope we don't regret that when we get there, but I think we made the right decision. There are a lot of tests that have been done at Michigan in which the teams didn't do particularly well when they went back, so it seems like Michigan is one of those tracks where testing there is a little bit iffy on whether it's a good place to test or not.

For some reason the track seems to change a lot from testing to when you get there for the race. So because of that was another factor for why we chose not to go there to test.

My crew chief Kevin Hamlin and I have a philosophy about how we approach each decision while we're in contention for the Chase.

In flying, it's called 'situational awareness,' and that's what we try to do here. We try to be aware of the situations that we're in, second to second in order to make a decision that will benefit us in that particular race.

When we go to Michigan we are thinking solely of Michigan and what can we do to give us the best chance to succeed here and only here. On Sunday night we'll change and begin thinking about the next race.

But we will definitely, from the driver's seat and the top of the pit box, be very aware of the situation that we're in -- not only from a points standpoint but also from the race's standpoint -- because the better we do in each individual race the best chance we have of being high up in the points.

When we went to Michigan in June that was our first time with the set-up package we're running this year.

Our set-ups are so radically different today than they were a year ago that every set-up is a surprise. We have been working very hard on new set-ups that we think will benefit us long-term, so we went to Michigan with stuff totally different than what we would have gone there with last year.

So every weekend's been a surprise, in that regard.

At Michigan, as it is at a lot of places, the strangest aspect of our set-up is no big secret -- it's how soft the front springs can be and how stiff the rear springs can be.

That's what all of us are trying to do -- we're trying to get the aero advantage of having the front end down and the back end up.

There are a lot of different ways to do that, and it's a lot easier said than done -- especially when we run the springs that we used to run in the back of the car, in the front; and the springs we used to run in the front of the car in the rear.

That's kind of where we are today and it's kind of backwards from what we ran five years ago. It's unbelievable, the difference in set-ups, but that's what you have to do to be successful.

With what the aero push in these cars has created at a place like Michigan, it makes our strategic choice at the end of the race, easier.

You want to be leading; there is no question about that. We play our strategy for sure to be in the front and make everybody have to pass us.

Clean air is so important, there have been several races won at Michigan where you can have a car that's a 15th or 20th place car.

I should have won Michigan three years ago. We had an engine blowing up in our car and we had to keep pitting to put water in it.

It got us in a situation where we had the lead with a car that ran 15th all day and the motor ended up breaking with three (laps) to go and we still finished fourth because we putted around.

But we would've won that race with a 15th place car because we had track position.

It's a little harder to do today because the tires wear out a little bit quicker, but track position is huge.

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