One year ago, Harrison Burton went into the fall race weekend at Bristol Motor Speedway preparing for an elimination race in the first round of the NASCAR Cup Series playoffs.
This week, Burton will head to Bristol looking to get his 2025 NASCAR Xfinity Series playoff run started on the right foot. It’s a year-over-year 180 for the 24-year-old driver, who is trying to rebuild his NASCAR career and build up an organization in AM Racing.
Burton’s Cup Series tenure with the Wood Brothers came to an end after 2024. A frustrating three-year stint with one of NASCAR’s oldest teams led to Burton, the 2024 Coke Zero Sugar 400 winner, dropping down to the Xfinity Series for the 2025 campaign.
Burton partnered with AM Racing, a team that was coming off an abysmal 2024 season. AM had parted ways with its full-time driver, Hailie Deegan, in July 2024, leading to several different drivers taking over for the second half of 2024.
Burton has provided some much-needed stability and speed to the organization in 2025, and after a hard-fought battle for a postseason spot, Burton and the No. 15 team clinched a playoff berth and will compete for the 2025 Xfinity Series title. The Huntersville, North Carolina, native will bring his Cup Series playoff experience from 2024 to his third Xfinity Series postseason as he tries to turn AM Racing into a March Madness-esque Cinderella story this fall.
“I think, just in general having experience in the Cup Series and in the playoffs in the Cup Series is huge,” Burton said during Xfinity Series playoff media day on Tuesday. “You kind of understand the level of competitiveness that you have to bring and the level of detail that you have to bring to succeed.
Our (Cup Series) playoffs last year (were) frustrating. We had a mechanical failure. We had a tire blown and we got crashed on the last lap, so three things that you don’t really have on your bingo card to take you out took us out. You learn from that and grow from that in the best way possible, and that is just controlling what you can control.”
Burton is no stranger to the pressure of the NASCAR playoffs. He competed for an Xfinity Series title in 2020 and 2021, and he’s been floating around the playoff bubble since Daytona in February. The No. 15 team is embattled – and that could be its greatest strength in the postseason.
“I feel like we’ve been in the playoffs for 10 weeks now,” Burton said. “Every race mattered. Every result mattered. There is some momentum in that. There is some benefit in that just because we’re used to it. We’ve been in that fire for the last 10 weeks, and (we’ve been) able to come out (of) the other side victorious as far as making the playoffs. Now, we have to go and understand that it’s gonna get even harder every single round, so we have to go and be more and more aggressive.”