Red Bull Racing’s vice president and general manager, Jay Frye, spent nearly 24 hours traveling to Austria for a three-hour meeting last Tuesday at his company’s headquarters, and Friday at Pocono Raceway confirmed the team is evaluating manufacturers for 2010 and getting closer to re-signing lead driver #83-Brian Vickers. “And that was a long [meeting] — usually they’re only an hour or two,” Frye said, laughing. “The meeting was great and there’s lots of enthusiasm for what we’re doing with the program. I would think in the next short while we’d have some sort of announcement of what the future is and what we have going on. I think what happened at the meeting was, all the scenarios were laid out, and they’re all great scenarios, but it was about what’re we going to do 10 years from now, or five years from now? “A lot of stuff was exchanged and there are a lot of things they have to review. I had a couple things I had to come back and do that have been done, so in a very short while we should have some things resolved.” Vickers has said he has an oral agreement to continue with Red Bull Racing Team, for which he’s driven the #83 Toyota since 2007, the inaugural year for both Red Bull and the manufacturer in the Cup Series. Frye, who joined Red Bull’s third-year Cup program last season, said that’s part of the reasoning that has put Red Bull in position to evaluate whether it will stay with the Toyota Camrys it’s run since it joined the series, or switch to another carmaker, speculated to be Chevrolet. David Wilson, senior vice president of Toyota Racing Development, came from a meeting with Frye to Pocono’s infield media center and said, despite knowing about Red Bull’s evaluation process, the manufacturer hadn’t changed its focus. “The bottom line is we continue to work with Red Bull and we continue to desire a longer-term partnership,” Wilson said. A Chevrolet spokesperson said the manufacturer would have no comment regarding its team lineup. Frye said Red Bull had no designs currently on expanding beyond two cars or diversifying into the Nationwide Series, where Vickers’ teammate, #82-Scott Speed, has about a half-dozen more races to run this season with Michael Waltrip Racing. “My opinion right now is we have to make sure these two teams are shored up and competing at a high level every week, and once you can do that, that’s when you start looking at expanding,” Frye said. “The whole team has come a long way, we made great gains in 2008 and statistically we’re ahead of where we were last year. Just like everybody else, we’ve had some bad luck and we’ve had some things happen.”(in part from NASCAR.com)(8-2-2009)
