Jeff Burton's near five-year streak without a Nextel Cup victory will last at least one more week after an early race engine failure knocked the Richard Childress Racing driver out of Sunday's GFS Marketplace 400.

After winning his fourth pole of the 2006 season on Friday at the two-mile Michigan International Speedway and running at the sharp end of the pack throughout practice, Burton and his #31 Cingular Wireless backed Chevrolet looked like a tough combination to beat in the build-up to the 200-lap race.

However Burton failed to lead so much as a single lap in the race itself, losing several positions at the drop of the green flag and then suffering a terminal engine failure shortly after the second caution flag of the afternoon on lap 18.

“It's a broken engine,” said Burton, who was classified 42nd thanks to his first retirement of the season and his first since Talladega last October. “But we've had great reliability with our engines and today we didn't. We're in a disappointing race but that just makes it that much more exciting for us and we just have to bring it to the next three races and just do a good job. I'm not down at all; I think this is a great race team. We will overcome this and we'll be fine.”

Despite going into Sunday's race with a decent cushion in the points standings, Burton's DNF's drops him no less than five places in the points table to ninth, just one place off the 'Chase bubble' and 84 points clear of the first driver not currently in the Chase, Kasey Kahne.

“This happens to everybody and right now we're in the heat of the point race, but stuff's happened to everybody all year long,” Burton continued. “It was just our turn today. We've had some great fortune and our engine programme has been extremely reliable and today it wasn't. But that's no excuse for not getting our business done in the next three weeks.”