Jeff Burton: Disappointment Has Been the Theme of His 2011 Season

If you were to evaluate each driver in the Sprint Cup Series through the first 10 races of the season, some drivers would get very high marks.

Others would certainly get passing grades, while there are still some, that no matter how much we love them, would have to get failing marks.

Jeff Burton would unfortunately be one of the drivers in the latter category at this point. Not necessarily through all of his own faults, Burton has had an absolutely miserable start to the 2011 season.

Through 10 races, he has amassed a total of zero top-10 finishes. This is a driver who a season ago was in the Chase and contending for multiple victories.

Burton is a 21-time race winner in his stellar 19-year career. This is a driver, that 11 times has finished the season ranked in the top dozen in the point standings.

Yet for whatever reason, 2011 has just not been kind to Burton. Other than signing a contract extension with Richard Childress Racing, and seeing Caterpillar, his primary sponsor, also renew their contract with the team, very little has gone right for Burton.

Last season Burton had a very solid year. Though he failed to win a race, he put himself in position to do so multiple times. He finished the year with 15 top-10's. He led 539 laps last year which was the second most that he had led in a single season since 2000.

So, after a solid campaign a year ago, it's safe to say that expectations were high for the 44 year old, South Boston, Va., native. And the season actually got off to a wonderful start.

In Daytona for speedweeks, Burton showed to be one of the strongest cars throughout the opening practices. Then after failing to secure one of the top two starting spots via the time trials, Burton went out and earned his starting spot by winning one of the two Gatorade Dual races.

This left little doubt in anyone's mind that Burton was a force to be reckoned with.

He backed up his Dual performance, in the Daytona 500. He was strong early on, leading a handful of laps, before he lost an engine about halfway through the race. He was the second RCR car to have engine woes, as his teammate Kevin Harvick had lost his much earlier in the event.

Since then, it has been nothing but disappointment with some bad luck thrown in, for Burton. He was one of the best cars at Talladega, and was almost certain to be involved in that wild finish for the win, when late in the race a couple of cars got sideways, causing the rest of the field to take evasive action.

Through all of that, Burton lost his drafting partner and slipped to the back of the lead pack, ultimately finishing in a disappointing 16th place.

Then, this past weekend in Darlington, Burton was poised for his first top-10 of the year, when for the second time this season he blew an engine. This happened with 10 laps to go in the race, while Burton was running in seventh place.

Fortunately for Burton, the series heads into Dover this coming weekend. This is a track that Burton has fared very well at recently.

In his last 12 starts here, Burton has seven top-10 finishes, including a win, and has not finished worse than 16th in any of those starts. He also finished runner up in both Dover races a season ago.

So, while 2011 has been nothing but frustration for Burton, there is plenty of reason for optimism. We are coming up to some tracks where he has had plenty of success.

And with the new Chase qualifying rules, all he needs to do is have his luck turn around just a little bit, and find his way into victory lane, and we can almost forget about the miserable way this season started.