Author: Daniel McFadin
Date: Nov. 23, 2017
Being a teenager in the Burton family is not what it once was.
For Jeff Burton, the age of 16 included the end of his go-kart career. Still in school, he played soccer and basketball and went to parties on the weekends in his hometown of South Boston, Virginia.
He also dated his future wife, Kim, a junior varsity cheerleader who spent time in gymnastics and performing in dance recitals.
“We were allowed to just be regular kids,” she says.
For Harrison Burton, the highlight of his mid-teens was becoming the youngest NASCAR K&N Pro Series East champion, less than two weeks before his 17th birthday on Oct. 9.
He earned the title Sept. 29 when he won the season finale at Dover International Speedway and exited the race with an eight-point advantage over season-long rival Todd Gilliland.
It capped a year where the MDM Motorsports driver scored five wins, including four in the first eight races. He also made six starts in the Camping World Truck Series with a best finish of fourth at Martinsville Speedway a month after he clinched the K&N title.
Not bad for someone who committed to the family business at the age of 9 after four years of racing quarter midgets.
“I think I was pretty old, like relatively,” Harrison Burton says.
Going National
“Quarter midget racing, it was fun,” Harrison says in his father’s shop in Huntersville, North Carolina, which houses one of his late-model cars and the red 1957 Chevrolet his parents drove in their youth.
“You would race and then go play football afterward … tackle a guy so hard that he would wreck you. That was kind of the extent of that. It was a bunch of friends and we’d travel around and race.”
Then USAC established a national quarter midget series, one that would send 10-year-olds and their parents as far west as Phoenix.
Harrison wanted in.
At the time his father’s Cup career was winding down, but it still kept Jeff Burton from attending most of his son’s races. Sundays after races and Tuesdays were dedicated to working on Harrison’s cars.
“He came to us and he had a proposal,” says Jeff Burton, now an analyst for NBC Sports. “We both immediately said, ‘No, there’s just no way that we can do it.’ We were explaining to him, I’m racing. This means we’re going to be separated as a family.
“So his reply to that was, ‘I don’t want to do anything that’s going to hurt our family. So we just won’t do it.’
“I don’t know if he’s a good salesman or what he is. But now how do you say no to a kid that has that perspective? Essentially (Kim) had to make the decision because I couldn’t do it.
“Can she do it? Can she manage it? Plus a daughter. Can she manage this?”
She did.
For two years, Kim Burton shepherded her son’s young racing career and her daughter’s horse riding career while also attending her husband’s Cup races, typically all in a three-day span.
It was this period, in which he competed in roughly 300 races (including heat races), that Harrison thought back to when he arrived in Dover’s Victory Lane.
“I just thought about all the races, all the weird areas I’ve been around the country,” he says. “My mom in a motor home.”
“Not so great hotels,” Kim quickly adds.
It was much like those days in the early 90s, when she and Jeff went from track to track as he worked to establish his name in the Xfinity Series at the same time she worked as a teacher.
“It was just, ‘Are we going to race each year?’” Kim recalls. “That first year, it was us in a van, basically. We drove around the country all night long, trying to eke out, figuring out how to make everything work. He had a crew of a few guys that were his late model guys. It was hard. It wasn’t glamorous. Riding in a van with five stinkin’ men, all night long. It was like, ‘What am I doing?’
She was unknowingly preparing herself for her son’s own journey into NASCAR history.
‘This feels really slow’
It was in Harrison’s second year in the national quarter midget series that his dad saw “it.”
That’s when “the magic happened,” Jeff said.
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