NEWTON, Iowa — The one-day show at Iowa Speedway couldn’t have gone better for Harrison Burton.
It may not have been the victory he and the No. 25 AM Racing team were looking for to lock into the NASCAR Xfinity Series Playoffs, but Burton returned to the top 12 in the playoff standings with a fifth-place run Saturday afternoon, his second top five of 2025.
Off the hauler in the morning, the No. 25 Ford was quick. Burton put down the second-quickest single lap in practice. He qualified 17th, but Burton was confident in the short-run speed he had to take advantage on restarts.
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“I fired off really well,” Burton said. “I could get aggressive, go three-wide kind of at the end there and make that work, but I kind of fell off as a subsequent cost of that. That was kind of our story all day. I had to manage our car a lot, keep the right-front tire on it all day, and, man, it’s rewarding. I feel like this package and this car, even though it’s a single-groove track and hard to pass, there’s a lot you can do as a driver, so it’s rewarding to see the results of that, and the results of all of our team’s hard work.”
Burton found himself outside the top 10 late in the final stage after losing multiple spots on pit road following a Daniel Dye caution on Lap 202.
Trying to work his way back inside the top 10, a key moment and call from veteran spotter Kevin Hamlin put Burton in a spot to get to the front.
With 27 laps to go, Matt DiBenedetto ran into the back of Corey Day entering Turns 1 and 2, causing the front end of the No. 99 Chevrolet to cave in and billow smoke. On the following lap, Ross Chastain slid up the track, and Brandon Jones spun due to oil in the high groove that came from DiBenedetto’s car.
Before entering the corner, Hamlin emphasized to Burton to keep the car as low as possible, and the No. 25 was able to skate through without issue before the caution came out for Jones.
“It was awesome,” Burton said of Hamlin’s spotting. “Ross, he ran in there and ran high. We got him, the 20 (Jones). That’s two spots, and that’s a whole row you gain on a restart and gives me the chance to go get three-wide, pass up to third and kind of defend from there. Just a huge, huge moment for us in the race.”
The top five moved Burton to 12th in the provisional playoff standings, 17 points above Ryan Sieg at the elimination line as both passed Harrison’s cousin Jeb Burton, who entered with a 10-point advantage on Harrison before Iowa in what was the final provisional spot in the 12-driver playoff field. However, Jeb’s No. 27 Jordan Anderson Racing Chevrolet struggled from qualifying and couldn’t find speed during the race, resulting in a 29th-place effort, one lap down and falling to a 19-point deficit outside the postseason grid.
Getting back above the elimination line isn’t the goal for Burton. With two road courses and Daytona International Speedway looming before the playoffs begin, he knows a surprise winner is potentially in the cards and that he can find himself quickly back outside of the postseason picture.
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“This isn’t it. There’s a lot of racing left to go, so we have to just stay status quo and stay hungry,” Burton said. “I’ve been in these situations before, and you can never guess on what’s going to happen. The 18 [William Sawalich] was fast today. He could have won. There’s all kinds of things that could happen where the cutline could get moved. We have to go try and win one of these things, and it’s nice to be getting closer, but we just have to keep pushing.”
But a complete, clean day with a lot of speed will have Burton smiling on the flight back to North Carolina. He won’t credit himself as much as all the crew members on the single-car AM Racing organization that put the 24-year-old driver in a position to be successful at Iowa.
“Just really proud of our race team. We are doing a lot with the little number of people that we have,” Burton said. “Gosh, they work their butts off and they’re [up] late, loading up and try to get going. When they put their heart and soul into it, this is what we see, and I’ll try and do the same for them. It’s really, really fun.”