Around the Track: NHIS

New Hampshire International Speedway once again hosts the kickoff event as the second annual Chase for the Nextel Cup gets under way with Sunday afternoon's Sylvania 300.

In his latest edition of Cingular's "Around the Track," Jeff Burton talks about Nextel Cup's 27th race of the season, what it will take to win on the relatively flat 1.058-mile oval and his goals as a non-Chase contender.

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Jeff Burton: It just seems like Phoenix, Richmond and Martinsville -- those types of racetracks are where we are doing our best this season.

I've won quite a few races at Loudon. We didn't run as well as we would have liked to last spring, but we built a brand new race car to take back.

It's a really nice car and the body on it is really good. We put a lot of focus on this race. Hopefully that will pay off for us.

When you make a lap of New Hampshire, the frontstretch is really going uphill. As you head into Turn 1, you don't want to be right on the bottom of the racetrack, like you do most places -- you want to be in the middle, where most of the grip is.

You get wide open on the gas as quickly as you can and, as you exit Turn 2, you have to be real careful because the backstretch wall comes up on you pretty quickly.

The back straightaway is a downhill straightaway, so your speed going into Turn 3 is much higher than it is going into Turn 1. You get on the brakes hard and again, the middle of the racetrack is about the best place.

At about the middle of the corner, you get back to the gas as quickly as you can and get onto the front straightaway and back to the start/finish line.

Turn 2 at New Hampshire is probably where the most danger exists. For some reason, that wall comes up on you so much quicker than it does in Turn 4.

	Inside the Numbers Jeff Burton at NHIS Year Start Finish 1993 6 37 1994 39 38 1995 30 25 1996 24 4 1997 15 1   39 14 1998 5 1   25 5 1999 38 1   37 4 2000 4 11   2 1 2001 10 11   12 17 2002 21 12   22 20 2003 13 9   15 42 2004 27 12   26 15 2005 25 14 Average 20.7 14.0

You see a lot of incidents off Turn 2, of cars getting into the wall.

Then, because the groove is so high, passing someone when you are on the bottom is very difficult. You have to get a lot of grip. You see a lot of cars body-slamming each other going into these corners because everybody is fighting for the middle of the racetrack.

Most tracks this size, you want to run on the bottom, but at Loudon, because of the different angles of the groove, you want to be in the middle.

There is a lot of side-by-side action, a lot of fender banging and a lot of incidents because of people fighting for the middle of the racetrack.

I led every lap when I won the fall race in 2000 at Loudon, but it's going to be real hard for that to happen again unless we have a race that is all green flag laps.

I still don't understand why somebody didn't stay out and lead a lap under caution that day. Normally you'll have the guy running 25th stay out and lead a lap under caution -- and why they didn't do that I don't know.

Everything went our way that weekend. We qualified second and passed Bobby Labonte on the first lap, then had great pit stops and the car ran well all day.

It was just one of those days where everything went right, almost perfect. You don't get many days like that so it was real special and pretty historic.

Since our Cingular Chevy team didn't make the Chase, we need to build and get to the point where we feel really good going into next year. We need some momentum on our side and to prove to ourselves we can run in the top 10 on a consistent basis.

That's really the focus. We want to improve our performance on longer tracks; that's where we've been our weakest.

We have three tests left and we are going to use all three on mile-and-a-half tracks.

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Our mile-and-under program is pretty good and our superspeedway program is pretty good, but the mile-and-a-halves are killing us. We have to focus on making those better.

As we head into the Chase, in my opinion this track probably favors Kurt Busch. He's run very well at this racetrack. And Matt Kenseth -- his Roush Racing teammate -- has run very well at this racetrack.

If it would favor anyone, this track would probably favor those guys.