Burton critical of Stewart’s comments
“I didn’t agree with his comparison with the wrestling or with him saying NASCAR didn’t run a fair race. I didn’t agree with those things. The conversation about cautions I think is okay to have. I think that’s a reasonable conversation to have. TV is talking about it. I think Tony exaggerated when he made the comparison. It was counter-productive rather than productive. But Tony didn’t mean any harm by it. He was trying to make a point. Tony is a racer’s racer. And all he was trying to say was, ‘hey, let’s just make sure we’re thinking about the racers’. I just think he over-exaggerated."
“That’s just my opinion. I don’t think Tony meant any harm by it. I think he meant good by it. Our sport is an interesting sport. We don’t have time-outs. We don’t have two-minute warnings. I believe in my heart that this sport has mostly benefited by having cautions mostly early in the race. Maybe we just ought to have them. Maybe at lap 40 we ought to have a caution. When the race starts, the track is different than it was when we had practice. The 30th place car is greatly advantaged by having a caution so he can work on his car so that there are more cars that are able to be competitive when the race ends. That’s the advantage of cautions."
“The disadvantage is that every caution, someone gets hurt. So when we throw a caution, we have to understand that we’re hurting people too. It’s a difficult thing. “Hey, I go to a football game and it’s like they never play. They stop and they play and they stop and play and they stop more than they play and it’s like, good gosh, that gets old. But stoppage in play does help how many cars can be competitive. But every time there is a caution, somebody gets hung out. Somebody has already pitted. Somebody was good on long runs. But as a rule, it gives more teams a chance to get their stuff together."