Busy week for Burton includes visit to sponsor (cont'd)

"I think it's important," he said. "I enjoy understanding what the products are that our sponsors make and provide for their customers. I enjoy that. I think it's necessary for me to do as good a job as I can to understand what exactly it is that they do and how they do it.

"I've built my own racecars in the past and enjoy building stuff and fabricating, and in particular have used Lenox products a lot. To see how they're actually made was kind of interesting. You go buy a hole saw, you don't even think about it. It's just a hole saw. But then you see all the effort that's put into making that hole saw. It's pretty incredible. You look at all the engineering that's involved in making it, and it's pretty neat."

Jeff Burton takes a plant tour.

There's a lot that goes into driver-sponsor relationships. It's not just "hey, thanks for the millions of dollars, really appreciate it, see you later," or at least it isn't that way if the relationship is expected to last any length of time.

Drivers and sponsors form relationships with each other, and some are easy, Burton said. Some aren't, but that's just like everyday life.

"It's different with every company," Burton said. "There are people in every company that you spend more time with than others and you get to know them better. This was the first chance for me to really go to Lenox and meet most of their people. I've met quite a few of them, but I hadn't met all of them. We're still forging relationships there.

"There are other companies, SKF, for example, and Coca-Cola, that I've worked with for a tremendous amount of time and I have relationships with them over a long period. Everything is different; there's not stereotypical or normal relationships. A lot of it has to do with, just like anything else, there are some people you really hit it off with right off the bat and like to do things with."

Burton said that, given what he does for a living, relationships of any kind are sort of hard to come by.

"To be quite honest, the time that we have is so limited," he mused. "We just don't have a lot of time to do much of anything. It's really busy, and our sponsors are busy too, so we really don't do a lot socially with our sponsors. I don't do a whole lot socially with anybody. There's just no time."

As for motivation, a racing driver has that in spades. Passing it along to a group of employees is easier than most might imagine, Burton said.

"A lot of times, there's a particular subject that the company is going through something, or me and my team are going through something," Burton said. "I like to share my experiences that I've been through and things that I've learned, so that I can apply more sensibly what it is I'm trying to say. Experience is an impossible thing to replace.

"Although people think it's a lot different, what we do as a business is just like every other business," he said. "I think the things that we learn to help us be successful, from a managerial standpoint and from a game-plan standpoint, I think those work whether you're making saws or selling cell phone service or whatever you do. A lot of it, the core values and principals are the same, no matter what the product is. Because we're in sports, a lot of people are watching us and looking at us, and we get a lot of attention, and that gives me the opportunity to talk about it. But a lot of it is no different than what everybody else does."

It's just that we do it without a cross-country flight, right in the middle of the workday.