Burton, Busch biggest Chase gainers after 48

DOVER, Del. -- The contrast was evident as soon as the two drivers climbed from their race cars after 400 grueling laps at Dover International Speedway Sunday.

Jeff Burton finished second to race winner Jimmie Johnson and was very happy about it. Kurt Busch finished fourth, but had mixed feelings because he thought perhaps he could have done more if he hadn't suffered a penalty for speeding on pit road.

The bottom line was that both were able to shave points off the lead held by Denny Hamlin two races into the Chase for the Sprint Cup. With eight races remaining, Busch moved from fifth to fourth in the standings and went from 86 points behind the leader to only 49 back; Burton went from 10th to seventh in the standings and from 112 behind to trailing by 80.

Other Chasers fared well Sunday, too. Carl Edwards finished fifth, Kyle Busch sixth and Hamlin ninth. But other than race winner Johnson, the four-time defending Sprint Cup champion, none gained more ground on the leader than Burton and the elder of the racing Busch brothers.

"It's eight races to go and our goal right now is to just keep trying to climb the points chain a little bit," Burton said. "We're not in a position; we're not close enough, where we're going to be able to leap into the points lead in the next couple of weeks. Our deal is that we've just got to grind and grind and grind so that when we leave Homestead [at the end of the season] we've got the points lead."

Busch was running third Sunday when he was nailed for speeding as he entered his stall on pit road. He exploded on his radio afterward, cursing repeatedly and at one point adding, "It's gotta be about halfway [through the race]. That's when we usually fall apart."

Instead of falling apart this time, the No. 2 Dodge team rallied. Busch wasn't in the mood to talk about how he put the penalty in his mental rear-view mirror Sunday.

"Yeah, I don't need to talk about that," he said curtly. When it was suggested that he comment on how he was able to put the mistake and the verbal explosion behind him, he snapped, "I always do. You guys make a big deal about my mouth, but I always put it behind me."

Big mouth or not, Busch drove the wheels off his car to get it back toward the front. He admitted it was all his fault that he suffered the pit-road penalty.

"We made the right calls to keep the car fast," Busch said. "We just had a pit-road speeding penalty, and that's all the driver. I made that mistake. I felt like a kid playing with matches and I got burned.

"The driver was just too aggressive, driving right on the edge, trying to get into the pits. So that hurt us. That was right at halfway and it took us 200 laps to get back up to fourth. I think we were running third when we had the penalty. So who knows if we could have mixed it up with them at the end?"

Not all of the 12 Chasers were able to mix things up with the front of the pack. Tony Stewart and Clint Bowyer also incurred pit-road speeding penalties that set them back, but they couldn't recover and finished 21st and 25th, respectively. And Matt Kenseth locked up his brakes trying to get to pit road and ended up blowing out a left front tire which cost him dearly, although he did rally to finish 18th.

The other Chasers who finished out of the top 10 included Jeff Gordon (11th), Kevin Harvick (15th) and Greg Biffle (19th).

That made Burton and Busch feel pretty good overall about their finishes in the end, even though they had different ways of expressing it. In finishing fourth, Busch matched his best finish ever at Dover -- a track where he has encountered his share of troubles.

"This was a tough one and Kansas will be a tough one," Busch said. "So I'm real happy with this effort. We were the third finishing Chase guy, that's what's most important."

Burton was the only one among the top six finishers who failed to lead a single lap. But in the end, the race victor was the only one who placed ahead of him.

He said he was happy to put the troubles of last week -- and the distractions of earlier in the weekend -- behind him. He was running near the front at New Hampshire when he ran out of gas late in the race one week earlier, and had to settle for a 15th-place finish as a result. And the distractions he spoke of involved the well-documented feud that developed over the weekend between points leader Hamlin and RCR.

"I'm the kind of person who looks back to try to learn," Burton said. "We have to be able to learn and get better. No question last week was really frustrating. We didn't have the best car -- but we had the third- to fifth-best car. You couple a fifth with a second right now and you'd be looking pretty sharp. But you know, it is what it is. Everybody is going to have some trouble. Nobody is going to go through this thing without some kind of problem.

"I'm really excited about that. I really thought we would be bringing our best stuff to the race track these last 10 races. There is a lot of work left to do."

As for the feud between Hamlin and RCR that boiled over earlier in the weekend, Burton grinned.

"You know, everybody has a right to an opinion. But there's no reason to be disrespectful. I guess that's where I am on it," Burton said. "But I'm trying to concentrate on driving a race car and paying attention to those things. This week was a distraction, I thought. But, you know, that's when the tough teams need to stand up and be strong. I thought we did a good job this weekend."

• Press Pass: Jeff Burton