BRICKYARD 400 NOTEBOOK

updated 9:13 p.m. ET Aug. 6, 2006

INDIANAPOLIS - Jeff Burton expected more from his car and himself Sunday.

After winning the pole and dominating the first half of the Allstate 400 at the Brickyard, Burton sensed something was wrong with his No. 31 Richard Childress Racing Chevrolet and wound up with another long stroll back to his trailer.

“I’m glad, to a point, that we can be disappointed with 15th,” he said. “But to lead that many laps and not be in the mix is really disappointing.”

Burton thought something broke on the car, which caused him to start sliding backward about midway through the race. Until his team could get the car back to the shop for a postrace evaluation, though, Burton couldn’t say exactly what happened.

“I don’t know if we had a spring collapse or whatever,” he said. “It just quit. We made huge adjustments to fix it and we never got close to fixing it.”

It was perhaps the most frustrating of Burton’s 13 starts in Indy.

He led 67 of the first 80 laps and appeared dominating at time.

After nine laps, Burton led second-place Kasey Kahne — the trendy favorite — by 0.766 seconds. Five laps later, the margin was nearly a full second and he eventually extended it to nearly 3 seconds.

It seemed only a matter of time before Burton’s disappointments at Indy would end. His best previous finish here was fifth in 1999, and his only other top 10 finish at Indy came in 2000 when he was sixth.

But after a restart on lap 61, Burton’s troubles began. He and his crew spent the rest of the day searching for answers that never came.

“It was really good the first half of the run, then we couldn’t run at all,” the 39-year-old veteran said. “That’s why I think something went wrong because the adjustments we made didn’t change anything.”

Tire worries
NASCAR officials were concerned enough with tire wear they called for mandatory caution flags around laps 15 and 40.

But even with the track temperature at 135 degrees for the start, there were few problems.

Points leader Jimmie Johnson, who eventually came back to win the race, had a left front tire deflate on lap 40, but that was about it for tire problems.

Goodyear officials were mostly pleased.

“As we expected going into today’s race, tire wear improved throughout the day and by lap 40 we were very happy with what we saw on the cars,” Goodyear spokesman Greg Stucker said. “We continued to see improvement throughout the afternoon.”

Committed to racing
Dodge Motorsports has lost two of its top executives in the past month, but the automobile manufacturer still intends to be a big player in NASCAR.

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