Burdett hopes to finish season strong with Jarrett

With just three races remaining for the current Nextel Cup chassis, Jason Burdett, crew chief for the No. 44 Toyota, recently took the unusual step of having several cars reskinned with brand-new bodies to take advantage of some gains the team had made in aerodynamics. It apparently paid off handsomely at Atlanta Motor Speedway, as Dale Jarrett qualified third and finished a season-best 19th in Sunday's Pep Boys Auto 500.

The team is hoping for similar improvement at Texas, where Jarrett wound up 30th earlier in the year.

Q: Obviously, Atlanta is similar to Texas in shape and length, but how similar are the setups between the 1.5-mile ovals?

Burdett: The tracks aren't the same but the setups are really similar. Friday night [at Atlanta], we had lots of stuff that really worked well for us. I think going to Texas, that's where we'll start -- and then make little adjustments from there. But it should be pretty close to where you need to be.

Q: How much did this weekend help the team's confidence?

Burdett: Realistically, our goal was to try and stay in the top 15 all day. I think we should have done that. We had a couple of speeding penalties on pit road and a few other things happen that we ended up where we were. But it's hard for us, because we haven't raced a lot on mile-and-a-halfs this year. We just haven't had a lot of luck qualifying for them and we hit on some stuff this week that really obviously helped us a lot. So we missed it a little on Sunday, but knowing what we did, when we go to Texas next week, instead of running 15th to 20th, we might be able to get 10th to 15th.

Q: You built brand-new bodies for a couple of cars, knowing there were only a couple of races left for this chassis. Why?

Burdett: In racing, you can't stop. Even though we're not going to race those next year, we still owe it to our sponsors and a lot of people to go run the best we can. Coming into this race, we didn't feel like our aero stuff was that good -- and we thought we could make it better. So we went ahead and built this car to come here. Thankfully it all worked out where it was really better for Dale and hopefully, it'll work out at Texas and Homestead, too.

Q: Is there anything on there cars that will translate over to next year, or will you be starting from scratch?

Burdett: The COT is totally different. The bodies are kind of what they are. You don't have a lot of room to work. With the splitter heights and all the different stuff, it changes how you go about everything. That's why coming here for a couple of days [of testing at Atlanta] is good, because you can't just test anywhere on a big track, a high-banked track like this. So it's good just to kind of get us thinking over the winter, so when we get to California / Las Vegas test next year, we've got a direction.