LOUDON, N.H. -- Jeff Burton once almost owned the deed to New Hampshire Motor Speedway, winning four of eight races between 1997 and 2000, including leading all 300 laps in September 2000.

But on Sunday, with a 57-race winless streak on the line and leading the Lenox Industrial Tools 301 on a restart with 14 laps remaining -- after running down Kyle Busch and leading the next 87 laps -- all Burton found was the latest recipe for heartache.

“

It's easy to sit back now and say we should have changed tires -- but all we had to do was drag two other cars with us [staying out] and we'd win the race. And nobody came.

”

-- JEFF BURTON

When the race's third of four cautions flew on lap 283, Burton and Richard Childress Racing crew chief Todd Berrier decided to stay on the race track with their No. 31 Chevrolet. To their dismay, virtually everyone behind them pitted and took tires, and when the race restarted at lap 288, the decision's value was immediately obvious.

And so was Burton's helplessness, according to race winner Jimmie Johnson, who squirted past Burton before the field reached the middle of Turns 1 and 2.

"At the end, it was one of those situations where we're going to do the opposite of what [the leader] does and he stayed out -- so we came to pit road and luckily the field followed us," Johnson said. "We got by him and got going."

"We just didn't have the grip I thought we would have," Burton said. "That's the first time we restarted on old tires. I just didn't know what to expect. Had I known that, then maybe I would have made a call [for tires] but that was the first time we did it all day."

And by the time the field had run one more lap, Burton was fighting for his life, with Busch, at that time for third place.

Adding injury to the insult of losing the lead, when they raced into Turn 3 on lap 189, with Busch's No. 18 Toyota on the outside, the two cars touched, Busch spun, Burton virtually stopped to avoid him and in the end, Busch finished 11th and Burton 12th.

Even though it was Burton's best finish here since 2008, "what could have been" did not even begin to describe it.

"That's pretty much been our year, right there," Burton said. "Obviously that last call was a tough call. It's just hard to know what to do. It's easy to sit back now and say we should have changed tires -- but all we had to do was drag two other cars with us [staying out] and we'd win the race. And nobody came.

"So sometimes leading the race is a difficult position to be in. At the end of the day, in retrospect, it wasn't the right thing to do, but that's real easy to say right now, and I'm not going to lose any sleep over it." (Continued)