TEAM RED BULL
DARLINGTON RACEWAY
DODGE AVENGER 500 ADVANCE

ENTRIES: Red Bull No. 83 Brian Vickers and Red Bull No. 84 AJ Allmendinger
RACE: NASCAR NEXTEL Cup, Dodge Avenger 500
TRACK: Darlington Raceway, Darlington, S.C.
DATES: May 11-12, 2007

+ SEEING STARS & STRIPES
One of NASCAR’s great inevitabilities is the Darlington Stripe, defined simply as a driver whose car makes contact with the wall at Darlington Raceway. It’s a rite of passage for rookies. No driver can say they’ve raced at Darlington until they’ve earned a stripe, and seldom does one come without another. Rest assured, AJ Allmendinger will earn his stripes this weekend. AJ’s No. 84 Red Bull Racing Camry will unload with a yellow stripe already on its rear bumper — a sure sign that he’s a rookie in Nextel Cup — and it’ll leave with an unsightly scuff on the right side because of repeated close encounters with the wall.

+ BV’S SECRET CRUSH
“The Lady in Black” bowed down to Brian Vickers in 2003. The second of three victories in his championship Busch Series season came at Darlington when Brian’s No. 5 Chevrolet slipped, slid and slithered around the 1.33-mile, egg-shaped track that’s famous for digesting large amounts of rubber in one sitting. He admitted Darlington is his favorite of all NASCAR tracks. After all, Brian, you know, is quite the lady’s man.

+ QUOTES
Brian Vickers, driver, No. 83 – “It’s a challenging track for sure. Everyone refers to it as ‘The Lady in Black’ because the wall will just reach out and grab you in a heartbeat. You run the race track right up next to the wall. The groove is so close that there’s just no room for error. It’s a little bit like a slip and slide. The track will just suck you right in.”

Doug Richert, crew chief, No. 83 – “The COT hasn’t been good to us yet, but we’re holding out and hoping we can turn that around at Darlington. So far our struggle has been the fact that we can’t quite get the COT to turn good enough in qualifying for that fast lap. We haven’t raced the COT since Bristol where we had a really good run, but that doesn’t help us much anymore since most of the other teams have been making more recent COT races. It just puts us further and further behind.”

AJ Allmendinger, driver, No. 84 – “I’ve been told it’s just hell on wheels. They told me to take the word grip out of my vocabulary because there’s going to be none. It’s a cool place, but at the same time it’s the biggest bitch in the world. I’ve never seen a place where you lose such an amount of time between your best and worst lap in a run.”

Ricky Viers, crew chief No. 84 – “It’s a matter of the driver being disciplined enough to save his tires by being easy on the gas. The biggest obstacle is making the car handle as well as we can. Most everywhere else you’ve got to run as hard as you can run from the beginning to the end. You have to pace yourself at Darlington.”