Once a promising, and seemingly rising star, Harrison Burton has been relatively quiet since his fulltime debut in the NASCAR Cup series in 2022.
Coming off a NASCAR Xfinity career that saw him score 4 wins and 26 top five finishes in 75 starts, since joining the Wood Brothers in 2022 he has only 1 top five and 4 top 10 finishes in 73 races. Late last season the legendary team, the oldest in NASCAR, made changes to Burton’s team that included a crew chief swap with Team Penske, the team they have a technical alliance with.
Burton enters 2024 hoping he and the team will have a breakout year.
“We hope so,” Burton said at Daytona 500 media day Wednesday. “That’s definitely what we’ve been working for. I think all off-season has been really good with our group to kind of build around.
“We had 10 races together at the end of last year to really go through those. We know each other well and kind of look at things through the mental side of the sport for the last little bit of the off-season and get ready to go for this year.
“I think our whole group is fired up and we believe we have the right group to make really, really cool and great things happen and it’s going to be fun to try and do it.”
NASCAR is a performance sport, and Burton is well aware he and the team need a breakout season. That comes with a great deal of pressure. But Burton says that pressure isn’t an issue with him.
“I think I just have been ready for it,” he said. “I don’t know. I’ve been racing for so long. I’ve been in a lot of high-pressure situations in racing and a lot of times the pressure is almost freeing. It’s a freeing feeling to know what’s on the line. That’s what you sign up for. This is a performance-based business and from day one when you sign up for that, you know that there’s going to be pressure and that’s almost kind of fun. I enjoy that. I don’t really look at it as too much of a burden, really.”
In order to up his, and the team’s, performance Burton knows what they will need to do.
“I think we just have to put ourselves in position more often.,” he said. “I feel like we’ve had fast race cars before. We’ve run fast laps for solid amounts of time in races and we’ve had good runs before, but not as consistently as we need to. That’s frustrating almost more so than never doing well at all because you know you can do it. We know that this group can do it and we have the ability to do it, but it’s just about putting it together more often. I think we’ve found some keys to try and do that better this off-season and I’m excited to go out and try to put our theories to the test and see if we can improve on what we think we will.”
To get more opportunities to be in a better position Burton said that looking at his weaknesses from last year really isn’t the answer.
“Racing is really hard because there’s not ever 100 percent this is the smoking gun,” he said. “There’s always so many variables. What I try to do is just look at myself and the things that I know I can control – decision-making is definitely at the top of that last, where you have to choose to be aggressive at times and choose to not be aggressive at times. I feel like for our team we just need to stay on the offense as much as possible. For us, this whole year is about never settling, never laying down, laying over and that starts with race one lap one and setting the tone for the whole year. Hopefully, in the Duels we go out and run well.
“Every lap matters and that makes it really easy for me as a driver to know we’re not going to ride around in the back. There’s none of that. It’s just let’s go racing and that’s a fun kind of mindset that we’re trying to lean into for sure.”
For 2024 Burton is ready to turn up his aggressiveness.
“If you’re going to go down, you might as well go down swinging,” he said. “That’s our feeling. The worst thing that happens is you end up hopefully running well and crashing. That’s something I can live with.
“One of my favorite races as a Cup driver is leading the Daytona 500 in my first Daytona 500 and flipping. I mean, I know it didn’t end well, but it was one of my favorites because for our first race as a group, to come out and try to be aggressive and win the stage was cool. That was a good feeling. The flip was obviously not my favorite part, but that mindset is what we need to carry throughout this whole season.”
Greg is the author of "The Nuts and Bolts of NASCAR: The Definitive Viewers' Guide to Big-Time Stock Car Auto Racing" and has been published in major publications across the country including the Los Angeles Times, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He was also a contributor to Chicken Soup for the NASCAR Soul, published in 2010, and the Christmas edition in 2016. He wrote as the NASCAR, Formula 1, Auto Reviews and National Veterans Affairs Examiner for Examiner.com and has appeared on Fox News. He holds a BS degree in communications, a Masters degree in psychology and is currently a PhD candidate majoring in psychology. He is currently the weekend Motorsports Editor for Autoweek.
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