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For just one weekend, Harrison Burton is back in the NASCAR Cup Series and it’s in the Rick Ware Racing No. 51 as a reward for his victory last summer at Daytona, which guaranteed him a starting position but without a ride.
Ware has two cars, one full-time driver in Cody Ware, with no reason not to invite a fellow Ford driver into the fold since it guarantees a entry they wouldn’t have otherwise. For Burton, he needed a ride for a race he wouldn’t have been in otherwise even though he was eligible.
Cody Ware gets to try to race his way in through the All Star Open, which he was going to have to do no matter what anyway too. It made sense.
“Yeah, it’s really cool,” Burton said during a media teleconference on Wednesday. “You kind of never know if an opportunity will come and having an automatic bid into the NASCAR Cup Series All-Star Race is such a big deal to me.
“Being in the race is a big deal and especially having my story with how it’s gone – of the ups and downs and now having a chance to kind of go and run in the All-Star Race is such a cool moment for me and something I’ve been really looking forward to. I don’t know about worried, but I really wanted to make this deal work out and I’m really happy it did and how it did.”
How it’s gone refers to how he lost his ride with the Wood Brothers after three seasons in the Cup Series and how he is striving to get back by returning to the Xfinity Series with upstart AM Racing this season. This is not a team expected to race for the championship but he does have them inside the top-10 of the championship standings.
That’s a considerable improvement over where it was with Hailie Deegan last year before both parties split over the summer.
With Burton back in the Cup Series this weekend, it’s a reminder of where he wants to get back long-term, but also the appropriate path to getting there. Other drivers have left the Cup Series to return to Trucks or Xfinity but there task was about winning and proving they belonged at the highest level.
AM Racing is not a team that is currently built to win multiple races a season, even if they could steal one at some point this summer, so how does Burton plan to validate his conviction that he’s a Sunday driver?
“That’s a great question,” Burton said. “For me, it was a risk to do this pathway of going to AM, a team that was coming off of a really, really rough season on their end. For them it was a risk going to a driver that had just lost his job, but the thing that I think is really going to help as far as getting me back to racing on Sundays is, to me, it means more to be a part of a rebuilding race team and turn that team into a successful race team.
“For us, to be able to win a race, to be able to contend for race wins, that would be huge not only for myself as the driver on the racetrack, but also off the racetrack because there’s a lot of key decisions that I’ve been a part of, there’s been a lot of things that I’ve been a part of week in and week out to try and be a part of building this race team, and it’s made me a better race car driver.”
Daylon Barr Photography
Burton says he was the first hire when AM Racing re-calibrated over the off-season and that this team has his fingerprints all over it from crew chief Danny Efland, spotter Kevin Hamlin and even their engineering group.
“I’ve learned more ins and outs of race teams and more tough decision-making and been through tougher situations in this year than a lot of times in my career, so I think that is valuable,” said Burton, “just as how it was valuable for me to race with the Wood Brothers and learn from Len and Eddie Wood and Joe Gibbs and Kyle Busch.
“I’ve been all over the place and in a lot of different ownership groups with how they run things, so I’m starting to learn all this stuff and I think I’m getting more valuable on the team side as well as on the racetrack.”
It's also easy to forget this, because Burton has been around NASCAR’s national touring landscape forever, but he’s still 24-years-old. He has a support system that includes his dad, Cup Series veteran Jeff, Dale Jarrett, who was similarly forced to return to the Xfinity Series before coming back to Cup and becoming a Hall of Famer, or everyone he has ever driven for.
“To be honest with you, I felt like I started to do that towards the end of my run in Cup as well, where even before and after the win at Daytona we started qualifying better, running better, and I think I learned a really big lesson from my Cup time in that way,” Burton said. “The first two years or so I spent trying so hard to be something other than myself, and then after I got told I wasn’t going to have the job next year I said, ‘OK, I’m just going to kind of do this my way,’ and felt like I was more confident for some reason after that.
“There was no pressure anymore. It was, ‘OK, this is already a done deal, let’s just go race and enjoy this and work really hard and try and make the most of it.’ We started running better and I think I learned a really big lesson from that that I’ve carried to AM Racing and hopefully will carry for the rest of my career.”
A career that he hopes ends back up on Sundays … permanently.
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