Red Bull is up with people

After making only 23 races in 2007, Brian Vickers has started every race in '08 and earned Red Bull's best finish ever at Pocono. Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images for NASCAR

Start-ups in any industry are an arduous undertaking. They stumble, they fall, they inevitably make changes. They look for any light at the end of the tunnel to help them find their way out of the darkness.

Red Bull Racing has lived that process in the past two years, a Sprint Cup team that started with a megabucks sponsor who also was the owner. It had no employees, cars, engines or shop. Red Bull must have figured that wasn't enough of a challenge because it decided to start with a manufacturer entering the series, Toyota. It would have been more efficient and taken less effort to become a satellite team for one of the established operations, Childress or Gibbs or Roush Fenway, who could provide chassis, engines and information.

And for the coup de grace, Red Bull hired a driver, A.J. Allmendinger, with a grand total of three starts in the Craftsman Truck Series in his NASCAR career and very little other experience in stock cars.

Predictably, in its first Cup season of 2007, Red Bull stumbled, fell and made changes. Two of them have been prominent in the team's turnaround: General Manager Jay Frye and Kevin Hamlin, crew chief for Brian Vickers.

Vickers delivered the team to second place, its best finish, Sunday at Pocono and Allmendinger was a career-high 12th.

It's been a solid season for Vickers, who is 17th in the points. He was out of the top-35 in owner points to start the season and drove himself into them by the fifth race. Vickers, unlike last year when he made only 23 races, hasn't missed a race this season.

Pocono was no fluke. Vickers may have used strategy to jump from fourth to first by staying out on the final caution, but only winner Kasey Kahne got past him on the 19-lap run to the checkered flag.

Vickers has been a contender for top-fives in the last three races. At Lowe's he led four times for 61 laps before a loose wheel pitched him into the wall and he finished 42nd. At Dover he paid the price for a speeding penalty, finishing two laps down in 13th. He was fifth at Talladega, ninth at Atlanta, 11th at Fontana and 12th at Daytona.

Mature and in his fifth Cup season at 24, Vickers points to several factors for the team's drastic improvement. "Some of it's just time," he said. "You can't replace time and experience.

Some of it is people and, at this point, it is all about people. Jay Frye coming on board has been great leadership from the top. It always starts from the top down, but there's been a lot of other people. Jay has been a large part of it, but I don't want to give him all the credit.

"There's a lot of people that have been on board and a lot of great people that are still there from last year that just have not been able to do what they wanted to do. Or, maybe it just wasn't the right time or place or maybe they didn't have the right guidance for leadership from the top. All around, the team is growing and getting better, stronger."

Frye joined the team in January. Red Bull had been without a GM since Marty Gaunt left in August. Frye brought tailor-made experience to the operation. He was MB2's GM when it began in 1996 and continued when Bobby Ginn bought the team in '06. Frye found himself unemployed when Ginn merged with DEI in the middle of last season.

Frye had a reputation for getting the most out of what he had at MB2 and Ginn. The team won races with Johnny Benson in '02 and Joe Nemechek in '04.

"Jay has just brought a lot of organization to this team," Allmendinger said. "He has a ton of NASCAR experience that just kind of goes from top to bottom --from everybody at the top to everybody at the bottom on the team. It shows."

Hamlin has also played a critical role. He's been a crew chief in Cup since '91. He had nine wins -- five with Dale Earnhardt Sr., two with Kevin Harvick and two with Robby Gordon -- in a nine-year tenure at Richard Childress Racing. He made the call that kept Vickers out at Pocono. More importantly, Vickers has had competitive cars more consistently this season.

"I felt like we had the best car on the race track [at Pocono] at the end of the race, but we just didn't have any tires," Vickers said. "We did the strategy we had to do. Kevin made a good call. Clean aero is huge in these cars."

Vickers seems reluctant to take too much credit, but he's the biggest reason for Red Bull's new-found respectability. Think about it. This is a team that went five months without a GM and he went through two crew chiefs last year. Vickers was the team's leader during that time.

The youngest driver, at age 20, to win a NASCAR national series (Nationwide in '03), Vickers spent three seasons in Cup at Hendricks before asking to be released to join Red Bull. He had a 4.43 grade point average graduating from Trinity (N.C.) High but many thought he didn't use his brains in that decision.

Vickers wanted to be the No. 1 driver, something that wasn't going to happen for a long time if ever at Hendrick, and figured Toyota would get there eventually. It was a leap of faith that looks good now.

Allmendinger has made large strides in his second season. He failed to qualify for the opening three races, prompting Frye to replace him with veteran Mike Skinner for five races. Skinner made all five races, which poured much-needed data into the team. Allmendinger went testing during his hiatus, coached by Skinner, and has returned to qualify into six straight races.

"We've been definitely, the 84 guys, on their A game for qualifying," Allmendinger said. "I feel a lot more comfortable in running in qualifying -- going and getting a lap and still making the race and not overdoing it. But, we've just been missing that good race. So, it's good to finally just put everything together."

Allmendinger says Red Bull has been building new cars in-house and that's been the biggest difference for him. "New components that we're doing on the chassis, I really think that's really what it is," he said.

But watching Skinner qualify in those five races showed Allmendinger that the equipment was there to do the job.

"[I learned] just to be confident in myself," he said. "There was stuff wrong. The 84 guys, we just needed to get better as a whole. It wasn't all on my shoulders. I'll always take some blame for it. When I got back in the car, I was more confident and just trusted myself more."

Vickers is 112 points behind No. 12 Tony Stewart in the race for the Chase, but it's probably a stretch to think he can contend for it. The No. 84 of Allmendinger is outside the top-35 in owner points and must continue to qualify for the rest of the season. Red Bull still has much hard work to do, but with two talented young drivers and a good management structure, it could get into the upper tier faster than anybody could have imagined a year ago.