Burton's mid-Chase surge comes minus expectations (cont'd)

"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."