Team Red Bull focusing energy on twin duels

Shot under bridges and along graffiti-covered alleys in New York, the photos in the Team Red Bull press guide have a dark, brooding quality rarely seen in NASCAR. Clad in leather jackets, pictured with a halter-topped woman on one page and a tattoo artist on the next, Brian Vickers and A.J. Allmendinger look less like racecar drivers and more like antagonists in a Quentin Tarantino film.

It's slick, hip, and stylish, another small attempt by the first-year Nextel Cup operation to show off its anti-establishment edge. But this week, as the season-opening Daytona 500 approaches, Red Bull is an outsider in more ways than one.

There are no points from 2006, no provisionals, no guarantees of making the sport's biggest race. Red Bull's two Camrys are among the 25 cars battling for seven available starting spots, four of which will be determined in Thursday's twin 150-mile qualifiers. The other Toyota teams have some breathing room -- Dave Blaney of Bill Davis Racing finished in the top-35 in owner points last year, and Dale Jarrett of Michael Waltrip Racing has a past champion's provisional.

Red Bull has none. Like former Daytona 500 champions Waltrip and Ward Burton, like series stalwarts Joe Nemechek and Bill Elliott, like rookies Paul Menard and Regan Smith, it all comes down to going fast or going home.

"I'd be lying to say we're not nervous or worried about it," Red Bull general manager Marty Gaunt said. "As a startup operation, you're always concerned about many different aspects of the team. We wish we would have had a better test at Daytona, but yeah, there are going to be some anxious moments in both 150s.

"I think if we can get past Daytona, if we can get over that hurdle, I feel pretty confident looking at California, Atlanta, and some of the other places. But Daytona is going to be the hardest deal to do."

For Red Bull, owned and sponsored by the Austrian energy-drink giant of the same name, it's been an inauspicious preseason. Vickers posted the 37th-fastest speed of the two-week Daytona test session, while Allmendinger ranked 54th out of 64 cars. During testing at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Allmendinger crashed twice and Vickers finished well down the speed chart.

"Team Red Bull seems to be looking for a bit of help," said Jim Aust, president of Toyota Racing Development.

There are hurdles off the track as well. Engineers and fabricators, hamstrung by the natural impediments of building a team from the ground up, are racing just to meet the demand for cars. "The guys at the shop, I don't envy them right now," Allmendinger said. "Every day and night, they're building cars."

And now, the pressure is on. In front-row qualifying Sunday, Allmendinger posted the 11th-fastest speed among the 25 drivers trying to race their way into the 500. Vickers placed 14th. Their Daytona now comes down to Thursday's qualifying races, where only the two highest-finishing cars in each event, among those not already qualified, get in. The final four spots go to the three-fastest remaining cars from front-row qualifying, and a past champion.

"It definitely puts a little stress on the situation," Vickers said. "But that's what we're here for. I mean, this is big-time auto racing."

No one understands the situation better than Scott Riggs, who entered Speedweeks 2006 in a new Evernham Motorsports ride, but no owner points. When he busted a gear in front-row qualifying, his 150-mile heat -- not the 500 -- became his big race. His team's entire focus wasn't winning Daytona, but just getting into it.

"Your whole thought process was just more consumed with the 150s than it was with the big race," Riggs said. "You were just consumed about, 'What do we have to do if this situation comes up, if this circumstance comes up, how do we need to play it? How do we need to do this or that?'

"There's just a lot more preparation and thought about how to race the 150s, where all those other guys were saying, 'This is the way we're going to race the 150s, because this is the way we think our car needs to be [for the 500].'"

Going 0-for-2 at the Daytona 500 is an unfortunate possibility for a Red Bull squad still trying to find its footing in NASCAR's top series. Vickers may have won the last Nextel Cup race on a restrictor-plate track -- under controversial conditions, inadvertently punting former teammate Jimmie Johnson on the final lap at Talladega -- but this isn't the Davis team, which essentially transitioned from one manufacturer to another. This isn't Waltrip's outfit, with two Daytona 500 winners behind the wheel.

Even Toyota will admit that Red Bull is playing catch-up within its own fleet.

"They're basically starting with almost nothing as far as information is concerned about the track, other than what was brought with the people Red Bull has been able to hire," Aust said. "So I think maybe they might be a little bit behind in that regard."

But as Riggs learned last year, missing the Daytona 500 isn't as calamitous as it seems on the surface. Granted, he spent the first half of 2006 trying to pull himself up into the top 35 in points. But he finished 20th in the final standings, earning two poles, eight top-10s, and $3.7 million.

"In some crazy way, it actually made us more focused," Riggs said. "It was like we all had something to prove as a group. Not as individuals, but as a group, together, that we can win races and we deserve to be at every race and we deserve the recognition our sponsors give us. I think there are going to be a lot of troubled people after this race, more so than what we were last year."

And the sponsors of those teams outside the top 35 in points should understand the risks, driver and Petty Enterprises CEO Kyle Petty said. Petty failed to make three races in 2003, and two more in 2005. He made sure his team's backers knew the No. 45 car was on the brink, and that starting spots weren't guaranteed. The Red Bull brass in Austria need to understand the same thing.

"I would hope and think that some of these teams that are starting this year, that don't have that safety net to work with, have already laid that groundwork," Petty said. "So I don't think it's going to be a major deal if some of the more well-funded Toyota teams, or teams of any manufacturer, come to the racetrack and then have to go home. It's not going to be that big a deal."

That doesn't mean Allmendinger, fresh from a Champ Car circuit where he was a top driver and never had to worry about a place in the field, frets any less over qualifying. "It gives me nightmares," he said. He'll have them for at least the first five weeks of the season, until 2007 owner points kick in at Bristol.

But it's one thing to miss events at Las Vegas or Atlanta, and quite another to miss stock-car racing's Super Bowl.

"It would hurt. I'm not going to say I'm going to be happy about. But it's not going to be crushing. If we make it, then fantastic. But if not, then Fontana is the next weekend. You miss that one, there's the next race," Allmendinger said.

"That's the great thing about the schedule. Sure, it can get heavy in the middle and tedious, but if you're running great, you want to go race every weekend. And if you're running bad, you know there's a next weekend.

"I would much rather have that schedule than have 14 races, and when you have a bad weekend you've got six weeks off to think about it before you get in the car again."