Jeff Burton is a political junkie, a basketball fan, a safety advocate and a racecar driver

FORT WORTH, Texas

What do you see when you look at Jeff Burton? A driver? The man leading the NASCAR Sprint Cup points? The defending winner at Texas Motor Speedway?

If that's it, you're missing who Burton is. Peel the layers and you see a person considering a career in politics, an unabashed Duke basketball fan and someone with a desire to leave an impression as he has with safety and rebuilding Richard Childress Racing.

"I think he is an incredibly interesting and diverse and complicated person because you can talk to him about so many things," said Eddie Gossage, president and general

manger of Texas Motor Speedway. "There's a lot of these drivers here that you can't talk to them about anything other than racing."

Burton concedes there's a danger in his varied interests.

"Sometimes I think that is a distraction," said the 40-year-old South Boston, Va., native. "Not to me, but to other people because they think that maybe I'm not just focused on this. I know that's not true, but not everybody knows that."

Burton looks beyond racing because "I think that makes me a broader person and, by the way, I think that makes me a better race car driver."

Those interests, Burton notes, keep him from focusing 24 hours a day on racing. He said he tried that for 20 years and it didn't work.

His focus shifts until it's time to race - many times to politics. Although he has said he'd like to be a U.S. senator, he's backed off that and acknowledges other position could be as meaningful.

"It's hard to say what I'm going to want to do 15 years from now, but I like being in the middle of stuff," Burton said. "I think that I have a good reasoning capability, and I seem to do pretty well in getting people together and coming up with a direction."

He challenged NASCAR's safety efforts after Dale Earnhardt's fatal crash at the 2001 Daytona 500. Burton spent his own money to test head supports and improvements to racing seats.

Burton's quest for safer conditions continues. This week he raised questions about Pocono Raceway. He said the track needs to pave the grassy area along the backstretch and inside wall because pavement slows sliding cars better than grass. He also notes the inside wall is a guardrail with dirt mounds behind it.

"I don't know if they just don't want to spend the money or what the deal is but Pocono is quickly turning into the track that is doing the least to move safety in the right direction, which is real frustrating," Burton said.

A Pocono official did not return a call, and Robin Pemberton, NASCAR's vice president of competition, said: "We work with the race tracks all the time on making improvements."

Burton also offers suggestions outside racing. The Duke fan, whose family has had season tickets for several years, has endured the Blue Devils' early exits from the last two NCAA tournaments.

"They've got to have the same caliber athlete that Carolina and Kansas has," Burton said. "They haven't had that. They haven't had a go-to guy in a long time that had a supporting cast."

Burton plays that go-to role at Richard Childress Racing.

The team won four races in the 2-1/2 years before Burton's arrival in the middle of the 2004 season. The team was winless in 2004 and won once in '05. It has 10 victories since 2006.

"I want to see Richard Childress Racing win championships, but honestly, I want to win a championship," he said. "I have a tremendous amount of respect for a lot of people that haven't won championships, Mark Martin for an example, but it means a lot to me to win a championship.

"I want people to refer to me, as a champion, and by the way a champion that did other things too."