Jeff Burton People Quotations

Racing is safer today than it was five years ago, but we didn't know it. People ask me, 'Do you feel safer today in a race car than you did five years ago?' No, I don't. I felt safe five years ago. I thought we were doing all we could do. I didn't know we could do more.

Before that, it was kind of a macho thing. It was like, 'Just get in the race car and drive.' I've never concerned myself with being very macho. I try to be smart, be educated and do the right thing. That has become more popular today than it used to be. People are willing to talk about (safety) now.

Certainly through change, some people get their feelings hurt, there's no doubt about it. Unfortunately, some of the people in some of the areas have lost the opportunity to see as many races as they had. But what we do is big business and what we do relies on a lot of people being able to see it.

We lost three very young, very talented drivers in a really short time and that had a lot of influence, too. Certainly Dale's death was a huge smack in the face to everybody, but all those deaths in such a short period of time was awful. It forced people to look at it and say, 'Hey, this isn't a coincidence. There's something going on'.

I believe that a lot of it had to do with Richard's being a nice guy. I think that he was really nice, almost was too nice, to a lot of - not individual people but to the groups. I think he gave a lot of groups the benefit of the doubt, that they were doing the right thing, and wasn't dropping the hammer when things weren't what they needed to be.

He and Bill Jr. had a really good relationship. As Bill Jr. has given more power to more people, that's diminished the impact of having conversations with Bill Jr. a little bit, although don't think for a minute Bill Jr. isn't stomping his feet somewhere. I think it's much more of an open community today. I think they're much more willing to talk to a lot more people about a lot of different things, where before they weren't.