1995 Past News & Sources

Good run at Michigan didn’t help Burton keep ride in Dillard’s car, Second-year driver apparently has job on Bill Davis’ team

Winston-Salem Journal

Ward Burton didn’t get much time to celebrate his best run of the year, a shot at victory in Sunday’s GM 400. Less than 24 hours later he was released by car owner A. G. Dillard, being replaced by Greg Sacks. But yesterday Burton was already being fitted for a new driver’s suit for this weekend’s race at Bristol with Bill Davis’ Pontiac team.

“I think I’m in the car for Bristol, though we haven’t finalized it,” Burton said yesterday. “Bill has gone to a General Motors meeting about the new motor rules for next year and he’s going to talk with (Chevy execs) Herb Fishel, Don Taylor and Gary Claudio. But we’re far enough ahead that I’ve ordered the uniform. There is a pretty good possibility we’ll reach an agreement today for the rest of this year and next year. “Buddy Parrott has assured me and Pontiac that he will be a consultant to our team. Bill has a strong team now; we’re just trying to make it stronger. I’m excited about this, it’s just the timing wasn’t quite right.

“Alan said he could not secure a sponsor for ’96 with a driver he knows wants to leave. I just wish he had told me two weeks ago, or at least a week ago, I could have prepared myself a lot better for this. This is just so unexpected for me. When he called me Monday and said he was thinking about making a switch, I told him I’d like to give it a few more weeks at least. But then I realized the deal had already been done. “It’s a little bit disappointing about how I was treated. I don’t think anybody likes being fired, no matter what the reason is. But it’s kind of the nature of the beast in this sport. I’d heard some rumors that Greg was going to be in the car at Michigan, but that didn’t happen. And rumors are pretty abundant this time of year, so I didn’t pay much attention to them. And after our performance Sunday — we had an outside chance to win the race if we’d gotten a caution late, because we had two good rightside tires — it caught me a little by surprise.”

Burton and Davis, with a big push from GM officials, had been planning to team in 1996 anyway. “We’d been talking (with Davis) but we hadn’t taken it to the point where we were going to make an announcement,” Burton said. “And we really wanted to do everything right. I wanted to treat Alan right, and Bill wanted to treat Jimmy (Hensley) right.“Bill is concerned about doing Jimmy right, which is good. At the same time, I don’t know if Jimmy is going to be physically okay after what he went through at Michigan; he passed out after he got out of the car. I don’t know if it was heat exhaustion or carbon monoxide, but sometimes your body can handle heat one day better than another day.”

Burton nearly pulled off the upset of the year Sunday. The Burton-Dillard team has supposedly been on its last legs the last several weeks, but Burton and crew chief Philippe Lopez certainly surprised everyone. “When you’ve got a car under you that you can believe in, with the right chassis, you don’t have to run as hard, you don’t have to work so hard just to stay in the lead lap,” Burton said. “And when I started the race I felt real good about the car.” Burton, with some gutsy driving, had moved to second, on Jeff Gordon’s rear bumper by lap 152 of the 200-lapper, and he was suddenly threatening the upset. But Burton, like Gordon, was trapped in the gas mileage maze, giving up his position with a quick last stop for gas 48 miles from the end, and eventually finishing sixth.

“Man, they put a great car under me,” Burton said. “We’ve had some good runs. With the resources we’ve got, I think we’ve done a fair job the last year and a half. We’ve had some good and bad times. We’ve worked hard, me and Phillipe and Ronnie and all the guys were looking forward to Darlington, Charlotte and Rockingham and Atlanta, where I thought we had a good baseline. “I learned a lot about the track running Saturday’s Busch race. Some things only come with time. If you’re sitting under the car before the race is over, you don’t have much of a chance to win. But we had a chance to win this race. Any time you run in the top five, anything can happen. This time, it’s just that gas mileage made a difference.

Burton, one of General Motors’ promising young drivers, was particularly pleased to have a good run in front of all the GM brass. The run should boost his stock. “It can’t hurt anything,” he said with a grin. “All those Chevrolet guys up there, Herb Fishel, Don Taylor, Jim Perkins, Gary Claudio, they’ve been super to me. I’m just glad I could do a good job for ’em.” COULD BURTON have gambled on fuel and pitted when Bobby Labonte made his last stop, 110 miles from the finish? “We had some radio problems,” Burton said. “They said they were trying to talk to me right then, but I wasn’t aware of it. They’d told me if the leaders came in, I should come in. But Gordon (the leader) and Ricky (Rudd) and Rusty (Wallace) didn’t come in, but Bill (Elliott) and Bobby did.

“We’d run out of gas here last time while running in the top 10, so I think the crew was being on the safe side a little. Burton says that the Dillard team was finally getting turned around. “I think the team is getting over the Hoosier days,” Burton said. “Goodyear has one heckava tire every week. At (Indianapolis) Raceway Park (two weeks ago) we could have run the whole race on one set of tires. Goodyear has a real aggressive but safe tire. But the (chassis) setups are different, and I’m just starting to learn them, and to learn what it takes to make the car go. We always thought the latter half of the season was when we would overcome some of our problems.”