Vickers hopes today's knocks lead to tomorrow's wins

	After failing to qualify for six of the first 10 races this year, Brian Vickers has made it into the starting grid in five straight events. Jason Smith/Getty Images

It seems so easy to make a move as a free agent in sports, but it never is. When an athlete leaves a strong team to take an unknown risk somewhere else, the move is especially difficult. For someone to make that type of life-changing choice, you have to possess enough confidence in both your ability and your future to believe every decision you make will wind up the right call.

One year after taking the plunge and leaving Hendrick Motorsports, Brian Vickers clearly is one of those rare breeds that has no problem moving forward.

While Vickers' former organization is busy dominating the Nextel Cup landscape this season to the tune of 10 wins in 15 tries, a realistic Vickers is busy looking ahead to the creation of his own future powerhouse. Aligned with a new Toyota team and a new set of expectations, anything resembling a championship or a spot in the Chase is now a few years away.

It's easy to look at Vickers, the success of his former team, and wonder what might have been had he stayed. But that hasn't frazzled a guy who seemingly doesn't possess the word "regret" in his vocabulary.

"I knew those guys [at Hendrick]," Vickers explained. "I knew what they were in the process of building down the road. Borrowing some of the cars from the No. 48 has helped (Vickers' old No. 25 team) a lot over the last few races, and it's shown.

"But the choice to leave didn't happen because these types of things couldn't happen ... but because they didn't happen [for me when I was there]. I'm a long-term thinker. When I sit down and I do my New Year's resolutions, they don't just involve 2008 or '07. They involve '07, '08, '09 and '10. Doing that, at the end of the day, I felt like long-term, (Toyota) was the best move."

Looking at the stats, that statement is difficult to validate at first. Never failing to qualify with Hendrick, Vickers started off the current campaign by missing the Daytona 500, the most high profile of the 40 percent of races he's already failed to qualify for this season. But along with those lows have come some landmark achievements.

Team Red Bull's No. 83 team snagged Toyota's first top 10 (California) and top 5, as Vickers finished fifth at Charlotte in May with a car that led 76 laps. At one point, it seemed a win could be in the cards, until a power steering belt failure left Vickers holding deuces as the pocket aces went to the team Vickers left behind, the No. 25 Hendrick Chevy driven by Casey Mears.

Still, in the face of adversity, Team Red Bull left Charlotte energized, as Vickers had begun to prove himself in a year where Toyota's done nothing but struggle.

"[Charlotte] was probably the biggest race where we left thinking we can do this, we can win these races," Vickers claimed. "[W]e've just got to keep working hard to keep everything growing."