Bet on Fuel Pays Big for Brian Vickers

The tone in Brian Vickers' voice over the in-car radio was all crew chief Ryan Pemberton needed to know.

"I think he yelled at me, told me not to give him lap times any more," said Pemberton of the closing laps in Sunday's NASCAR Sprint Cup race at Michigan International Speedway while Vickers stalked leader Jimmie Johnson. "I knew right then he knew what he was doing, how he was doing it. He was just managing."

Manage, he did.

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Brian Vickers outlasted Jimmie Johnson in the reserved, fuel-saving dash to the checkers and kept his Toyota Camry -- or was that a Toyota Prius? -- far enough ahead of eventual second and third-place drivers Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr., respectively, to score his second career win and first team win for Red Bull Racing.

And boy was it a gamble for Vickers both in terms of winning the race and finding a way to earn a coveted spot in NASCAR's championship system -- all revolving around how well Vickers could stretch his fuel mileage.

NASCAR's tire supplier estimated before the race that teams could expect to get 40-44 laps on a full, 17.5-gallon tank. In June, winner Mark Martin had his fuel last until just before the finish lane in a 47-lap run to the checkers.

All of that, of course, meant one thing to Vickers and the rest of the leaders who decided to attempt making it 51 laps on a single tank to finish the race: it was going to be a gamble.

"Sometimes you put a stake in the ground," said crew chief Pemberton. "Either we were completely out of the Chase or we'd win the race."

Completely in or completely out couldn't have been more on the money.

As it turns out, Vickers' win left him just 12 points shy of making his first Chase for the Sprint Cup as one of NASCAR's top-12 drivers in terms of points after the third race from now in Richmond. Running out of fuel, though, would have been disastrous to those chances.

Jimmie Johnson did run out of fuel, though his team had nothing too terrific to lose thanks to their all-but-guaranteed spot in the Chase. He fell from 2nd to 33rd in the final two laps. Such a fall for Vickers -- say he ran out and finished 32nd -- would have put him nearly 140 points out of the Chase, a margin nearly impossible to overcome.

Talk about all or nothing.

"I got to tell you, when you're coming to two to go, I'm still sweating bullets no matter how much confidence you got," said Vickers. "It was definitely a sickening feeling in the bottom of my stomach we could run out at any minute. I felt confident about how much I saved, but, you know, it's hard not to worry about it."

The worries weren't any less in the command center of Vickers' Chase destiny where Pemberton sat on the pit box.

"You talk about the sickening feeling, what a relief to get that one over with," said Pemberton. "It was. If we ran out, that was going to be what we'd be talking the rest of the season."

The win, as they seem to do quite often, came at the opportune time for Vickers & Co. -- even without considerations for making the Chase.

Vickers has grown a little more vocal in recent weeks about his contract with the team not being picked up for 2010 -- late in terms of what other teams' standards have become. Team manager Jay Frye, though, assured that Vickers is a guy Red Bull wants to hang around.

"We have every intention of getting this done and getting it done very quickly. Today things are complicated," said Frye. "Sometimes we overcomplicate things. Every intention has always been to redo this. We're working hard to get it done. We certainly don't want him to go anywhere, except right where he's at."

The bode of confidence in his future has to be nice, but for Vickers to finally find Victory Lane after several near-misses has to ring quite nicely.

He's been close at Charlotte many times -- including once when a loose wheel came off his No. 83 while in the top-5 and ended up bouncing into an infield pop-up camper -- and just last year at Michigan, Vickers felt he got shafted after NASCAR confirmed they mistakenly placed him further back in the lineup on a late restart.

"It's been a long time coming. It's been a long three years," said Vickers of the team that began racing in 2007. "A lot of struggles, a lot of pains. No one gave up. That's the reason we're here in Victory Lane."