CONCORD, N.C. -- Two years ago, Jeff Burton left Lowe's Motor Speedway with a 45-point Chase lead and so much staying power that one competitor called him "the Iceman." One blown engine the next week at Martinsville changed everything, and suddenly the Richard Childress Racing driver was just another spectator watching Jimmie Johnson march to his long-awaited first Cup crown.

Now, Burton leaves the Charlotte racetrack under very different circumstances. He's the hunter rather than the hunted, down 69 points to Johnson with five races remaining in the season. But he's riding the momentum of a race victory Saturday night that boosted him to second place in the standings, and playing with house money as a driver who's not supposed to win it all.

"We're just having fun," he said after winning the Bank of America 500, his second victory this season. "We're paying attention to us. We're not going to get caught up in the point thing. We're paying attention to it, but we're not going to get caught up in it. If we don't win the championship, our year's not a failure. We weren't one of the teams that set the bar up there. We're just laying it out there, having a good time. Whatever happens, we look at each other at the end of the race, we all know we put a lot of effort into it. If we don't do well, we'll go back and try to do better next time. That's how we're going to approach it. That's how we've done it up to this point. That's how we're going to do it till the end of it."

And why not? In Burton's mind all the pressure is on drivers like Johnson, who remained atop the standings after Saturday's event, and Carl Edwards, who fell two places to fourth after suffering an electrical problem that left him 17 laps off the pace. Celebrating in Victory Lane, Burton remarked that almost everyone else in the title hunt has a tremendous amount to lose -- except him, the 41-year-old who's always up front but who can't seem to win enough races to close the deal.

"We've come into this thing very relaxed, committed to having a good time, committed to having fun," said Burton, who's finished no worse than ninth in each of the first five Chase events. "We may have gotten a little too tight [in 2006] because, you know, we'd never done it before. I didn't think we were last year, but we got off to a slow start. This year we just said, 'You know what, we're going to go, have a good time, race hard, we're going to do the best we can, and it will be what it will be.'

"I truly believe that those guys that won all the races and were the guys that everybody picked, those teams are in the position [where] anything less than a championship and their year's not going to be successful. It's just that simple. We're not in that case. Our deal is, we're just going to go have fun. Nobody's picked us. You know, I don't blame them. You should have picked Jimmie Johnson and Carl Edwards. You still should. Why wouldn't you?"

Is he playing head games? Maybe. But maybe he's also speaking from experience, as a driver who was tabbed as the championship favorite during the early stages of the 2006 Chase, his first foray into NASCAR's playoff round. Burton finished in the top five in final Cup points every year from 1997-2000, placing as high as third with Roush Racing.

But that was all before the Chase. The real eye-opener was 2006.

"It was my second year at Childress," Burton remembered. "We had been through a lot of changes, a lot of stuff going on at the shop, trying to make things better. Being a small part of Richard Childress Racing, we had both teams in the Chase. Just a lot going on, you know what I mean? It was kind of like our first shot at it. It had been a while since I had been in the mix. So we were getting accustomed to all that again. As relaxed as we wanted to be, you know, I wasn't as relaxed as I thought I could be. You know what I mean? I was saying all the right things, I was doing all the right things, I thought. But at the end of the day, I was still kind of tensed up about it. So lesson learned and we won't do that again."

Burton may have more than experience on his side. The last two years, the Chase leader leaving Lowe's Motor Speedway has been unable to hold on through Homestead, with Burton losing a 45-point lead in 2006 and Jeff Gordon losing a 68-point advantage last year. Now, it's Johnson's turn in the crosshairs. But Burton would still trade places.

"I'd rather have the lead," he said. "The only reason you wouldn't want the lead is because you're messing yourself up in your head. If somebody gave us 100 points a day, I'd take 'em. Having 100 points ain't going to make us run poorly at Martinsville. That's not going to determine our level of success. We're going to do that. There's going to be some things that happen to every team that you can't control. But the things that we can control, we set that destiny, not the points that we have."