"Mom always liked you best."

"You got a new bike. All I got was a chicken!"

	Burton, right, and Roush have had some luck at Vegas in the past.

The Smothers Brothers have gone NASCAR, or so it seems. Since older brother Ward Burton won the season-opening Daytona 500 two weeks ago, he has been like the more astute Dickie Smothers, while little brother Jeff has become the wise-cracking Tommy.

"To win a Daytona 500, obviously, is huge. To have one of us that's won it is great -- unfortunately, the wrong one won," Jeff Burton joked earlier this week. "I certainly don't want to take credit for something I didn't do, but every now and then you want people to know you're somebody's brother, and that'd be one of the cases.

"And, I got a free lunch out of it -- somebody thought I was Ward in a restaurant the other day, so they bought lunch for me. That was cool."

Oh, brother!

But Ward's day in the Daytona sun is now history, Jeff's Roush Racing teammate Matt Kenseth took his bows Sunday at Rockingham, N.C., and now Jeff hopes to bask in his own glow of notoriety in Sunday's UAW-Daimler Chrysler 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.

"Everyone around me is winning," said Burton, driver of the No. 99 Ford.

Now it's Jeff's turn. Sin City bookies have made the younger Burton one of the favorites to win Sunday's race, and for good reason. Although he finished a miserable 39th in last season's race at LVMS, Burton was second in the inaugural event there in 1998, and then captured back-to-back victories in the early March event in 1999 and 2000.

"I don't want to even try and explain it because I don't understand it myself," Burton said of his success on the flat 1.5-mile tri-oval. "I've got this stigma about me that I'm a flat-track driver, but go back three years ago and I got the most amount of points on superspeedways.

"I can't answer why we run well there. I like the racetrack, but most everybody likes the racetrack, too. We don't do anything special for that racetrack. I never tested there until this year, so I don't know why we do so well there. I'm comfortable there, we immediately liked the racetrack the first time we went there, and I think that means a lot."

Crew chief Frank Stoddard puts Burton's success at Las Vegas in more simplistic terms.

"I guess we've got a good driver," Stoddard said. "Right off the bat the first year we went there, we put a setup on the car and Jeff was real comfortable fthere. Other than last year, it's been fairly easy to go out there and run well because we just happened to hit on a combination that worked well for us."

Burton is enjoying a much different -- and more palatable -- start in terms of performance this season, as compared to his horrendous beginning in 2001. He comes into Las Vegas fifth in the standings. Heading into this race last year, Burton was 33rd and fell to 36th afterward, eventually dropping to 38th the following week.

"Last year, our mistakes were we didn't have the car driving good enough for him, and he tried to make something out of something that wasn't there," Stoddard said. "That got us in trouble. I didn't have the car handling good enough for him and then he tried to make up for it, and it's just not possible in this day and age. If the car's not driving well, you're not going to go out and win a race. Ten years ago, if the car wasn't handling well, you might be able to manhandle it, but it's not going to be the case this year.

"I'm sure we're going to go to Vegas this weekend and he's going to have in his mind that he's going to take the best with that car. If the car's a top-10 car, he's going to make it a top-10 car. But he's not going to make a 10th-place a third-place car. We'll just take our 10th and go on to Atlanta."

Following an extensive testing and redevelopment program within the entire Roush Racing organization during the off-season, Burton is enjoying the fruits of that hard work. And rather than worrying about the type of hole he dug himself early last season, Burton is concerned about more important things right now -- like winning his first Winston Cup championship this season.

"It's never too early to worry about points," the South Boston, Va. native said. "It's too early to panic about anything, and it's too early to get real excited about anything … It doesn't matter how you finished third or how you finished 38th, they pay you the points for where you finish.

"What we look at is how are we running and where do we need to be better. We didn't run great at Rockingham, but we didn't run terrible. We just kinda ran OK, and we did a great job of finishing sixth. We look at that with a little bit of disappointment, but at the same time, we're proud of ourselves for finishing sixth. We just analyze each race, but there's no question that we look at where we are in points because we dug ourselves such a hole last year, it took us forever to get out of it.

"But you can't really look so far as where you are in position, you have to look at where you are in the number of points you're away from the lead, or the number of points you're in the lead, because they change so fast this time of year -- you can be fourth and then the next week you'll be 19th. So, you don't really look so much at position, you look at how many points behind you are, and we're very comfortable where we're at right now."

Stoddard agrees.

"We've certainly put a more dedicated focus on making sure that we finish these races early in the year and don't take ourselves out of the points championship early in the year, to give ourselves a chance," Stoddard said. "I think Jeff is driving as smart as he's ever driven. He's as smart a racer as I've ever been around, and I'm sure as much as I learned things from last year, he learned the same things. I don't have to tell him how he needs to drive."

What makes things look even more optimistic for the No. 99 team is the fact that Burton, Stoddard and the rest of the team -- no matter how good or bad Jeff does Sunday -- will be leaving Las Vegas knowing the schedule over the next two or three months favors them, with several upcoming tracks having produced victories for Burton in recent years, including Darlington, Texas, Martinsville, Richmond and Charlotte.

	“	It's never too early to worry about points. It's too early to panic about anything, and it's too early to get real excited about anything … It doesn't matter how you finished third or how you finished 38th, they pay you the points for where you finish. ”
		— Jeff Burton

"Two races into the season isn't going to turn everything around, but it does tell us that what we saw in the second-half of last year is still holding true," Stoddard said, talking about how Burton rallied to a respectable 10th-place finish last year. "We got ourselves behind by getting in wrecks early, the tires threw us for a bigger loop than we thought they would, and it took a while for us to overcome that. We're still continuing to overcome it.

"But, it's a long ways to go, way too early to think two races fixes everything. We still have to keep our head close to the ground, working hard, to be competitive for the rest of the year. We still have a ways to go to be where we were back in 1998 and 1999. I think we were real strong back then and I think we still have to keep working hard to get back to that. That's the plan, but there's 43 other guys that have the same plan."

Burton hopes to pick up this Sunday where Kenseth left off at Rockingham -- in Victory Lane. Not only was Rockingham the venue for Kenseth's second career triumph, it was also a tremendous energizing factor for the entire operation. Not only did Burton struggle much of last season, his three teammates -- Kenseth, Mark Martin and Kurt Busch -- were even worse off during much of 2002.

"Kenseth winning at Rockingham was a big shot in the arm for all of us," Burton said. "It was no secret that Roush Racing struggled last year, that all of us struggled last year. But, we've worked real hard, our teams are working well together. We've got a good program, we just didn't do a good job with it last year.

"To get a win early in the year gets some adrenaline flowing within the whole company. I think it was a really big deal for us and we'll have to lean on that. It was a real good day for all of us."

Now it's Jeff's turn to have a real good day Sunday … and time for Ward to say with pride, "Yep, that's my kid brother up there on the winner's stand."

Jerry Bonkowski covers NASCAR for ESPN.com.