Ryan Pemberton (Left) worked as Brian Vickers (Right) crew chief in 2009, leading the team into the Chase for the Sprint Cup. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Vickers, preparing to enter his seventh Cup season overall and fourth with Red Bull, credits his crew chief’s attitude and their relationship with having a large role in the team’s surge over the past year.

“Ryan obviously brought a lot to the team and has brought more good people on board ,and he himself alone has brought a lot of knowledge and excitement and enthusiasm,” Vickers says. “I’ve really enjoyed working with Ryan. He’s very passionate about what he does, and he’s good at it. He brought some knowledge and stuff to the team that didn’t exist before. Red Bull has built a strong organization, and I’m very proud of what we’ve built.

“We’ve still got a ways to go to compete with the teams that have been around for 20 years like Hendrick [Motorsports] or 25 years, but what we’ve done in three years, I’m very proud of. There’s a lot of great people there besides Ryan, but he definitely added a lot to it. Him and I, our chemistry works really well together. We communicate really well together. We always have our ups and downs just like any relationship does, but I’m enjoying it, and I’m looking forward to another season.”

So is Pemberton.

Still, he’s a little stunned to see the evolution the sport has undergone just while he’s been a part of it.

He sees a lot of difference in how he’s planning to get ready for the upcoming season compared to how he prepared in the past. He has grown and adapted with the sport over the years and has the benefit of working in several aspects of it.

When he was first a crew chief, he sometimes also helped pit the car – something he says wasn’t that unusual. He has seen teams quadruple in size in terms of personnel.

And these days, he takes advantage on a daily basis of technology that didn’t even exist when he began working as a crew chief.

All of that probably helps him in his day-to-day job, but it also gives him an acute awareness of the opportunity he has been handed.

"There's so many different areas that have evolved, obviously, the technology, the simulation, that type of stuff,” he says. “That has been the biggest, most different. The racing part of it and working harder and being better than this person, that is still the same [but] it's on different levels now, but that is still - if you went back in time, the good people would still be doing good then as are now … It wasn't that long ago, it was ‘97, 98, 99 and going back to like 99, I think the only person in the whole shop that had a computer was the secretary up front. I can remember when Ernie Irvan was the driver of the car, M&Ms was the sponsor, and it was a big deal when we got a computer to run the chassis dyno. Those things went hand in hand, and that was a pretty big day for us. If we went and tested, we would rent computers … To say 11 years later that almost every single person on the race team carries a laptop with them so they can communicate with each other and back at the shop and each other at the race track, it's pretty amazing in 10 years how it has kind of blown completely out of the water.

“… Now the phone I'm talking to you on is smarter than the computer we had at the race shop. That's not even an exaggeration either."

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