‘Red Bull Guys’ keep climbing standings

They started the year at the bottom, but have worked their way up the list.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — A.J. Allmendinger does everything he can to avoid watching a Nextel Cup race on television after he’s failed to make the field.

It’s a bit easier for Brian Vickers, who takes off some of the sting by spending the weekend in New York City surrounded by friends as they watch the race go on without him.

Either way, both are miserable.

“It’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever had to go through,” Allmendinger said. “By far the toughest thing in my life, both personally and professionally.”

Fortunately for both of them, neither has had to suffer through it for quite some time. Allmendinger has qualified for the past six races, and Vickers has made the last five — almost winning at Charlotte last month, while giving Toyota its highest finish of the season.

Near top 35 spot

Team Red Bull, which started the season at the bottom of the Toyota group, has slowly separated itself from the others by consistently qualifying for races and inching Vickers close to a coveted spot in the top 35 in points.

“The Red Bull guys, considering where they started from, they’ve pushed themselves to the top of the Toyota heap,” said Lee White, vice president of Toyota Racing Development.

It’s been steady progress for Red Bull, which lagged far behind its Toyota counterparts when the season began. Bill Davis Racing is an established NASCAR team with a Daytona 500 win on its resume, and Michael Waltrip had assembled an impressive group of sponsors and an aggressive game plan for his three-car group.

But Red Bull was starting from scratch. Although the organization has roots in Formula One, MotoGP and various extreme sports, it was new to NASCAR and had to rush to get ready for the 2007 season.

Expectations were not very high, to say the least. And when Allmendinger and Vickers failed to make the early races, no one outside the team was really surprised.

Vickers started slow

Vickers, who left the mighty Hendrick organization last season to join Red Bull, missed six of the first 10 events. Allmendinger, new to NASCAR after a successful open-wheel career, missed the first four and eight of 10.

Both insist those early failures have helped Red Bull improve.

“It was pretty frustrating, very disappointing, and hard to deal with,” said Vickers, who has had to watch from afar as his former Hendrick teammates have won 10 of 15 races this season.

“But as the saying goes, ‘What doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger.’ So everybody at the team, and everybody at Toyota, it really opened our eyes up and made us focus on what we’ve needed to be doing. It made us that much more determined to go out there and do the best we can every chance we get.”

The effort has been evident in qualifying, with Red Bull finally earning the right to be at the track on race day. It’s a small step in the right direction, general manager Marty Gaunt said, but nothing to celebrate just yet.

Have momentum going

“It seems like we have some momentum, but by no means are we going to rest on our laurels because we made five, six, seven races,” Gaunt said. “Making races helps morale up, but the reality is we are sitting on the edge of a knife and we don’t want to say we’ve accomplished our goals because we are now qualifying for races.

“That’s just a very small part of it. Cracking the top 35, that’s a big part of it. Once we do that and start making races, then we will evaluate our performance.”

Getting Vickers into that elusive top 35 is critical for the rest of the season. It would ensure him a spot in the field each week, and give him the luxury of working on race setups during the Friday practice sessions. That data could then be transferred to Allmendinger, who can only focus on qualifying runs until he’s made the race.

As it stands now, both drivers spend all day Friday working on qualifying. When they do make the field, both are behind the competition in race day preparation.

Vickers was the closest to the top 35 of all Toyota drivers until an early crash last week at Pocono knocked him 303 points away from the cracking it. It was bitterly disappointing because he’d been on pace for a strong finish before the accident.

“It’s a hard thing to swallow when you’re taken out of contention for a great finish and there’s nothing you could have done to prevent it,” Vickers said. “The only positive thing that came out of this weekend is that we know we can put together a great race car and race up front with the leaders.”

In contention at Charlotte

He showed that in Charlotte, where he led 76 laps and was in contention for the victory despite having no power steering for most of the race. He finished fifth there, the best showing to date for a Toyota, and in many regards it was considered a victory to the thousands of Toyota employees who have excitedly followed its first season in NASCAR.

“People are educated and they understand when someone plays a cute game on a pit stop to take the lead,” White said. “But here’s a guy who powered past Jimmie Johnson, passed really good guys and then opened up a lead legitimately.

“To be able to do that, then overcome mechanical problems to still come back and get a top five this early in the season, that was surprising and very rewarding for a lot of people. It shows progress, and that’s all we can ask for right now.”