Busy week for Burton includes visit to sponsor

As a Nextel Cup Series driver, his day is segmented into chunks of time that, for the most part, belong to someone else. This needs doing, he has to be here at a certain time to do a certain activity and it all boils down into life in the spotlight.

This past weekend, which culminated in the Lenox Industrial Tools 300 at New Hampshire International Speedway, was one such period in Burton's life.

Jeff Burton visits a sponsor.

Let's walk through his weekend, beginning Wednesday at The Milwaukee Mile.

After testing his Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet all day Wednesday and on Thursday morning, Burton left the track at 11 a.m. CT, grabbed a quick shower at the Waukesha Airport and jumped on an airplane headed for Massachusetts.

He landed at Barnes Airport in Westfield, Mass., about half an hour away from the headquarters of Lenox Industrial Tools in East Longmeadow. A quick drive, and he is on site for a two-hour appearance.

Burton is introduced by Lenox president Bill Burke to a gathering of employees and launches into a 10-minute motivational speech followed by a Q&A session. At 3:30 p.m. local time, the employees sing Happy Birthday to Burton and present him with a cake onstage.

After a 25-minute photo session, it's 15 minutes of media interviews, and then a half-hour tour of the plant. Included in the latter is the taping of a demo for corporate use. A meet-and-greet with company officials ends the appearance.

It's back to the airport, back on the plane and up to Concord, N.H., minutes from New Hampshire International Speedway. He arrived at the track at 7:45 or 8 p.m., ending a day that started in his racecar in one time zone and ended at his motor coach in another.

That's one day in Jeff Burton's life.

"We do a lot of appearances throughout the year ... 60 or 70, but we don't really do a whole lot of what we did last weekend, plant tours and getting to see how things are made," Burton said. "I find that really interesting."

Lenox, in its first year as one of Burton's sponsors, had the primary sponsorship at NHIS, which made for the fairly exhausting and complicated (to us) schedule.

"Some of them are pretty complicated," Burton laughed. "We go a lot of different places and the weeks are full of travel. It's not unusual to be going from one place to another, by any means.

"We don't do a lot of things on Thursday. We try to use that as a travel day, and typically we don't test on Thursdays, but it wouldn't be unusual to be testing on Tuesday and Wednesday and then go home for a little bit and then go do an appearance. It's a little unusual to stack so much on one day, but not really unusual."

One question that never seems to be asked is what Burton takes away from a day like that, where he is on the run all day long.

"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.