Why Jeff Burton should not be in the NASCAR Hall of Fame

The fourth highest vote getter in last year's voting has a bizarre argument when looking into it.

Next week, the NASCAR Hall of Fame voters will come together and decide who will be in the 2026 class.

I keep track of each class and the voting results with a tracker on Google Sheets that can be found here.

For the purposes of this column, let’s look at the modern era ballot. 10 nominees per year, the top two on the ballot are inducted. Last year, Ricky Rudd finished with a commanding 87% of the vote, while Ralph Moody joined him in the class with 60% of the vote.

Coming in third was Harry Gant, who was third for the second straight year. Gant is thus a clear favorite to finally make it in this round of voting. The great Harry Hyde came fifth.

Between them in fourth was Jeff Burton. This is confusing to me, as Burton never seemed like a Hall of Famer. He always seemed like he was in the background, a guy who could win a race or two but never seemed like a top driver.

I decided this year to take a deeper look into Burton’s candidacy, taking a clear, unbiased view of it. What I have determined is that my findings were largely correct. Burton has an argument for the Hall, but the idea of him being even the fourth-best candidate on the ballot is a bit laughable.

Let’s take a look at all the different categories you can judge a NASCAR HOF case by, at least in my eyes. With the exception of maybe one, I don’t think Burton meets any of them.

On-Track Success

Obviously the best way to make a Hall of Fame argument for a driver is based on their results.

This is probably the strongest section for Burton. He won 21 races at the Cup level, a number on par with a number of drivers already in the Hall, like Bobby Labonte and Benny Parsons.

From 1997 to 2000, Burton won 15 races and finished in the top 5 in points every season. He was the first true success story at Roush Racing after Mark Martin.

Burton was a consistent driver. He finished top 10 in points in eight seasons in total, and his career average finish of 16.5 puts him on par with HOFers such as Rudd and Terry Labonte.

There’s no snark here. Burton on his best day in his best years was a very formidable driver, and one that the winner would often have to contend with.

Career Context

But the reality of on-track success is that these are just numbers. It’s hard for them to have value unless there is meaning behind them.

8,763,214 is a number I just typed out. It could mean 8,763,214 Big Macs, which would be a lot of hamburgers. It could also mean 873214 milliseconds, which equals 87 seconds. Not a lot of time at all.

Yes, Burton had success in his career. But he did it while he spent the vast majority of his career with either Roush or Richard Childress Racing.

Part of what made Rudd’s argument so strong last year was how consistent he was in spite of ever-changing teams and cars. Burton stayed with Roush for eight-and-a-half seasons and then RCR for nine-and-a-half seasons. That’s 18 years at top teams.

This is more time at top teams than most individual Cup careers. Joey Logano has spent about the same amount of time in top rides and utterly smokes him resume-wise.

“But those teams ebb and flow more than teams like Penske and Hendrick” would be a solid argument, except that Burton drove for Roush as they moved into their peak from 1996 to 2004. When they were at their peak, which I would define as 2002 to 2006, Burton was so off the pace from his teammates that he got replaced by Truck Series driver Carl Edwards. Edwards jumped into his seat and almost immediatly found speed.

Yes, RCR was not at their strongest point when Burton drove for them. But remember when I mentioned Burton got beat by his teammates at Roush? It was the exact same deal at RCR, where he never once finished ahead of all of his teammates in points in a given season.

Even if you count 2004, when Burton came into RCR mid-season, Harvick still finished ahead of him. Same as 2005.

In 2006, Harvick won five races to Burton’s one and beat him in points again, fourth versus seventh.

Burton actually got the measure of Harvick in 2007, but in spite of that, second-year driver Clint Bowyer beat him by finishing third in a two-horse championship race out front.

In 2008, RCR finished fourth through sixth in the standings, with Burton bringing up the rear behind Harvick and Bowyer. RCR fell apart in 2009, but Bowyer still finished over 300 points up the road from Burton.

Harvick and Bowyer beat Burton in 2010 and 2011. Bowyer mercifully left RCR after 2011, but in 2012, Burton sunk to a new low by finishing behind both Harvick and Paul Menard. Yes, Paul Menard. As Harvick competed for a championship in 2013, Burton finished 20th in points and behind Menard again before Childress finally had enough and cut Burton loose. After a few trivia question starts for Michael Waltrip Racing in 2014, Burton bowed out.

Well, wait, Burton was out of his prime at RCR. Which is not a great argument considering he was there almost ten years. But okay, Burton was at his best at Roush.

He finished ahead of all of his teammates just twice at Roush.

Once was in 2000, where he finished third in points. The other came in 2001, where Roush fell off a cliff and Burton finished 10th in points.

Then Kurt Busch came in and exploded to third in 2002. Matt Kenseth came into his own by finishing eighth in 2002 before winning the championship in 2003. And Martin rebounded from his slump to finish second in 2002.

It’s not a coincidence that most of the names I am listing here are in the Hall or, in Busch’s or Harvick’s cases, clear future HOFers. Because that’s ultimately what Burton was.

Burton was a fantastic teammate and a great wingman for better drivers. I would not argue that is what makes a good Hall of Famer, especially when he’s also getting demolished by both somebody who probably won’t go in the Hall (Bowyer) and somebody who will never be nominated (he lost to Paul Menard! Twice!)

Non-Cup NASCAR Success

Gant had about the same level of success at the Cup level as Burton, but a key part of his candidacy besides just being the Skoal Bandit is his massive success on the local short track level.

Gant was 39 years old during his rookie year in Cup. The reason he started so late was his dominance in local racing and success in the old Sportsman division, the precursor to today’s NASCAR Xfinity Series.

Obviously, drivers such as Jack Sprague, Ron Hornaday, and Greg Biffle all base a lot of their HOF arguments on their non-Cup success.

Burton was famous for getting his start by cutting his teeth racing late models at South Boston Speedway. But I couldn’t find where he had won a late model championship there in his youth.

While he did win late model races there, he didn’t seem to have a huge resume of late model success or any modified racing. Please correct me if you can attest to it, but what I found was more or less what most Cup drivers could claim to have prior to moving up.

He had five full-time seasons in Xfinity, winning one race in each of the last four seasons of that and having a best points finish of ninth.

Burton would later win 24 more races over the next 15 years driving part-time for Roush and Childress, but if we want to judge him on this, it still pales compared to a lot of other Cup drivers in that era who moonlit in that series.

Martin in particular had more race wins in the same equipment at the same time. When a Roush Ford rolled off the truck, people in that garage were far more worried if Martin’s name was on the doorframe than when it was Burton’s.

Popularity

A lot of people don’t like to admit it, but popularity can play a very large part in a successful Hall of Fame argument.

And it’s not just in NASCAR either. Joe Namath has fairly middling football stats but was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame based on being by far the most popular football player in the country for years, representing his sport well, and opening doors for others to follow.

When we look at the NASCAR version of this, Dale Earnhardt Jr. brought a fine argument to the table already with his career accomplishments. But his superstardom helping to drive NASCAR to its 2007 popularity peak helped turn him into a first-ballot inductee.

Burton was fairly popular, but I’d argue a big reason for that was less for who or what he was and more because he drove in the biggest era. Burton was well liked and respected, but he was a lot of people’s second or third favorite driver.

If we look at his peers, I’d argue a great comp would be Sterling Marlin. Marlin is a driver who I would agree has less of an argument for the Hall than Burton, but he’s a much more beloved name among fans when it comes to drivers from the era.

I decided to go back and look at every single Darlington throwback lineup from 2015 to 2025 via Jayski. I only looked at Cup, mainly to keep my sanity in check.

Throughout those 11 years of throwbacks, I might have missed one or two schemes, but I could only find three times Jeff Burton was thrown back to. And two of them were from his son, Harrison Burton, so they don’t really count.

And obviously, this is not an exact science, and it doesn’t prove much. But it does say a lot about Burton’s lasting popularity that not many people seem interested in running his paint schemes at the throwback race. Which feeds into…

Impact

Can we tell the story of NASCAR without this nominee? Did they leave a measured impact on the sport?

Burton was known through his driving career as the “Mayor” of the garage. Reporters could hit him up for a fair opinion that most in the industry agreed with, and his peers have nothing but positive things to say about him personally.

That’s all well and good, but did Burton leave that big of an impact on NASCAR? I honestly don’t think he has on the macro level.

Micro level? He served as a backbone guy for both his team and the garage. But he was never going to step up into the spotlight.

Burton fans would argue his safety record should be considered, and it absolutely should. But it’s not enough to get him over the finish line as a nominee when he falls short in as many categories as he has.

Broadcasting

Thanks to Ken Squier’s induction, broadcasting is its own special category that really does not make a lot of sense. There are a number of great broadcasters (Chris Economaki, Barney Hall) who haven’t even been nominated, and likely never will.

Still, being a great broadcaster helped boost Parsons into the Hall, and also serves as a crucial piece of Neil Bonnett’s argument.

Bonnett was renowned throughout his too brief broadcasting career and clearly holds up well watching him in that role now.

Burton has been able to hold onto an over 10-year career in the booth with NBC, but man, has it been rough at times.

Burton was fine his first few years in the role, but was almost immediately supplanted by Dale Earnhardt Jr. the moment Earnhardt joined the booth.

Bowyer and Jeff Gordon were a really, really bad commentator pairing in part because Gordon was a really bad commentator. But at least the two had some kind of angle to calling races for Fox, where they at least pretended to disagree on things.

Burton and Earnhardt were not aided by having that same piedmont accent, but they had no real angle to them being together. This meant Burton really didn’t have a decent reason to be in the booth because Earnhardt could do anything he did.

When Earnhardt left NBC after 2023, that let Burton take more of a role in 2024. I did not watch a lot of NBC’s NASCAR Cup coverage, but he seemed very forgettable still in the Xfinity Series races I was covering at the time.

At best, Burton has been forgettable as a commentator. At worst, he’s been a meaningless one.

Conclusion

Congratulations, you have read 2000 or so words on how bad Jeff Burton sucks and how he should not be inducted into the NASCAR Hall of Fame. At least, according to the Burton fans reading.

Again, I had no issue with Burton being named to the top 75 drivers list a couple of years ago. He’s basically the ultimate teammate, somebody who is beatable but was going to be pretty consistent and could win a few races.

But the Hall of Fame should have higher standards than this. Burton never felt above the field like a lot of his peers who are already in the Hall. Would you put him in the same category as Dale Jarrett, Bobby Labonte, and Martin? And those are just the second-tier guys; he was never at the level of the guys like Earnhardt or Gordon.

He doesn’t pass the eye test, and he doesn’t pass looking beyond just numbers on a web page.