By Joey Barnes, Editor-in-Chief
It was just weeks ago that Jeb Burton was confirmed for a full season with Richard Petty Motorsports in the XFINITY Series, and in just their second race together the duo secured a 10th place finish at Atlanta Motor Speedway on Saturday.
The finish didn’t fall on the luck of off-sequenced strategy either.
Burton, 23, started in 15th and climbed into the top five early and hung around with the Sprint Cup regulars.
As the race wore on the second-generation racer began to slide back some, but never dropped out of the top 10 when his No. 43 Ford came across the finish line.
“I was having fun today,” Burton said. “We did a good job. I felt like we lost some spots on that last restart. The longer we went, the tighter we got. It seemed like later in the day we just kept getting tighter and tighter. I’m really proud of the guys. They worked really hard this week, considering 14 days ago this team didn’t exist. I’m really proud of that and I feel like we’ll get better each week.”
Burton attributed the good run to some changes made following yesterday’s practice.
“Yesterday right at the end we changed some things in the front end and it helped us. I wish we could have unloaded like that and we would have been a lot better, but we were about a 10th-15th place car in practice and [crew cheif] Drew [Blickensderfer] worked really hard and all the guys worked really hard and made some adjustments.”
We’re still not where we want to be, but we showed little spurts of greatness today. We did it in the first round of qualifying and we’ll keep getting better and I think we’ll be even better in Vegas.”
Image: NASCAR Media Group
