The Burton family has conquered Daytona in several ways, except one. Ward Burton won the 2002 Daytona 500, while his brother Jeff, the 2023 NASCAR Hall of Fame inductee, won the Cup Series summer race there. And Jeff’s son, Harrison, won the Coke Zero Sugar 400 at Daytona. But Jeb Burton, aged 33 years old, still entered 2026 wishing for one win there to complete the family tally. And the reason he hasn’t been able to do so is far more frustrating, far more systemic, as Jeff shared on The Crossroads Podcast.
“Something happened… nothing you could have done about it. Sponsorship problem. And it changed your trajectory. It did, period, end of story. People take shots of basketball players, football players, when they see them, and you know, if you watch the football game, and the quarterback, he is on the field 40% of the time. He is on the field for an hour. You think you know that guy, you don’t know that guy. You don’t know what he deals with, you have no idea, and it’s the same for you guys,” Burton said of his nephew, Jeb’s, racing career.
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Truly, Jeb’s early credentials never seemed to lack much. His 2013 full-time Truck Series debut with Turner Scott Motorsports was one of the more impressive rookie seasons of that era, with five top-fives, 11 top-10 finishes in 22 races, a win at Texas Motor Speedway, seven poles, and a fifth-place championship finish. He was, by any measure, the kind of talent teams build around, as he competed for the Sunoco Rookie of the Year. Then the floor kept slipping out from under his feet, repeatedly.
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2014: Just weeks before Daytona, Turner Scott Motorsports announced the disbandment of the #4 team, the same one that put Jeb Burton in contention for the title in 2013. This was after the primary sponsor, Arrowhead, defaulted on a payment. Jeb did find a seat with ThorSport Racing that year, but that would turn out to be his final full-time Truck season.
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2015: In January 2015, Jeb Burton announced via social media that he once again did not have any sponsors for the season. He ultimately landed at BK Racing for one full-time Cup season, but it was a car nowhere near competitive enough to put on display what he had.
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2016: Jeb Burton found himself racing in the Xfinity Series (now the NOAPS) for Richard Petty Motorsports. However, even the NASCAR legend couldn’t free him from the sponsorship curse, as a dispute with their primary sponsor, J. Streicher, forced Petty to shut down the #43 team.
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2021: He finally seemed to have found a break with Kaulig Racing in 2021 in the Xfinity Series, where he even managed to win his maiden race in the series and led into Turn 3 on the final lap at Daytona, only to be edged out in a three-wide photo finish. However, Nutrien AG, sponsor of the #10 Chevy, soon announced that they were pulling out of NASCAR at the end of the season, and Burton once again found his future in question.
Those years of constant uncertainty took a toll on Jeb. He cycled through Richard Childress Racing and JR Motorsports in part-time capacities before Kaulig, collecting enough results to stay relevant but never enough backing to exhale a breath of sigh at the thought of something permanent.
Entering the 2021 Xfinity playoffs, Burton said on a media day, “I feel like these next several weeks I’m auditioning for my career. When it comes to my career, my back has always been kind of against the wall. It definitely hasn’t been easy by any means.”
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And because of that, his daily life was further consumed by it. “It’s all I work on. It’s something I work on every single day of the year,” Burton said of finding sponsorship in a 2020Fronstretch profile by Dustin Albino.
His wife Brandi, an ICU nurse who knew nothing about racing when they met, taught herself to build sponsorship decks and pitch companies on his behalf. “It’s difficult when everything is on your shoulders,” she said.
Jeb further confirmed how he was running from race to race while ensuring he put his best foot forward: “In our sport, if you don’t perform, you’re done… If I crash out, I can promise you, you make less money. That’s how I eat. That’s how I make money, is racing.”
Perhaps, being fast is the last item on that list of what goes wrong with many talented prospects in the sport. It’s the financial floor that collapses beneath them before anything else if their name isn’t associated with bigshots.
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Still grinding, still looking for what he deserves
Jeb has been with Jordan Anderson Racing Bommarito Autosport in the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series since 2023, and this has proved to be his longest stable stretch in NASCAR. The 2025 season was also his best in years, with eight top-10 finishes, a runner-up at Talladega, and a 14th-place championship finish. His average finish improved by more than seven positions year-on-year, and there was finally some consistency. But the ceiling of what Jordan Anderson Racing can offer is limited.
“I probably get more frustrated than anybody,” Burton told NASCAR.com in May 2025, “because I know that I can win at any of these tracks if my car will allow me to do it.”
By that point last year, JAR’s hauler sat parked in the garage behind JGR, RCR, JR Motorsports, and Haas Factory Team. Praise-worthy feat – in fact, he’d look at the points weekly after each race for motivation – but, at the same time, such a resource gap is not one a driver can outwork.
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Jeb told his father on The Crossroads Podcast ahead of the 2026 season: “I really want to win there bad. Everybody in the family’s won there but me.”
So, that sentence, as must be apparent by now, is not simply about Daytona.
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