Splitting the sky at terminal velocity, with the roar of the wind and the whip-crack of his jumpsuit drowning out his voice, Brian Vickers finally got jittery.

Nerves hadn’t been an issue all day as he prepared for his first skydive — a solo jump with four skydivers from the Red Bull Air Force by his side. Earlier that morning, Vickers surfed a column of air in a vertical wind tunnel to prepare for freefall. He needed only 20 minutes of tunnel time before the RBAF gave him the nod: he was ready. Then, after a long wait for thunderstorms to blow across central Florida, Vickers calmly endured a slow climb to 13,000 feet in a single-engine plane. And still: no nerves. Even jumping from the plane wasn’t as hard as he expected — it was just a matter of following the instructions he’d practiced all morning.

Then, at the end of his 120-mph, 50-second freefall — after checking his altimeter and mugging for the cameraman filming his descent — Vickers felt a twinge of fear.

“There’s no rip cord, like you see in movies,” he said. “You have a little mini-chute strapped to your chest and you just throw it out to your side. If everything goes alright, it catches the air and pulls the rest of the chute out behind it.”

But when he didn’t immediately feel the chute catch, a thought flashed through his mind: “I really hope I did that right.”

Of course, since he’s able to retell the story, Vickers did it correctly. The chute deployed and jerked him out of his freefall, leaving him free to drift in the sky. The whoosh of freefall replaced by the still of the low stratosphere.

Vickers landed safely but the next day, he was still coming down from the adrenaline rush. Words spilled out of his mouth as he relived the freefall. Specifically, the adjective “awesome” came up over and over. “I really couldn’t sleep last night, just thinking about the jump,” he said. “It was, by far, the biggest adrenaline rush I’ve ever experienced. Just jumping out of a plane, heading for Earth at a high rate of speed …,” and then words failed Vickers.

“It was awesome.”

Vickers would likely use the same word to describe life in general right now. After a long 2007, he and the No. 83 Red Bull team have shown marked improvement on the track. Meanwhile, away from racing, with Red Bull behind him, Vickers is enjoying a company-sponsored quest for his next big adrenaline rush.

To an outsider, it probably comes as no surprise that Vickers is a risk-taker. He is, after all, a race car driver. Anyone who can stomach handling a stock car at 200 mph clearly has a taste for action. But even among adrenaline addicts in the NASCAR garage, the 24-year-old has a singular appetite for risk.

An adrenaline junkie? “That’s probably a fair thing to call me,” he said. When he leaves the track, Vickers is as likely to grab his rock-climbing shoes and head for the steeps as he is to work on his short game at the local golf course. “I love to rock climb, scuba dive and kayak. Those always get me going.”

Vickers’ willingness to go all-in manifests itself on the track too.

A year and a half ago, he left the cozy confines of Hendrick Motorsports for an unproven team breaking in a new car. Then, as a lame-duck driver barred from HMS meetings, Vickers fought for a win at Talladega — when he really could have, and possibly should have, just taken it easy. Instead, he wound up snagging his first Cup win.

But it’s that very attitude that makes Vickers such a perfect fit for Team Red Bull. He’s young, polished — unafraid. He’s the ideal driver for an energy drink that has staked its reputation on performance with attitude.

When he was looking for a new team, Vickers had the feeling he’d found the right one in Red Bull — one that could provide more than just a competitive car.

“I knew that they’d be fun,” he said. “The opportunity to do some incredible things was definitely attractive when I was looking for a new team.”

To go from pitching car financing and Garnier hair products at HMS to being the NASCAR face of one of the most youth- and action-oriented brands on the planet? It must have been a no-brainer. Vickers went from schmoozing corporate execs in conference rooms to chilling out in the Red Bull Energy Station.

Red Bull has built a global brand by sponsoring “extreme athletes;” those who are lucky/crazy enough to lay first tracks down the steepest mountain faces in the world, race airplanes just feet off the surface of the Thames river or paddle kayaks over rain-swollen waterfalls. And now, NASCAR drivers fit the bill too.

The energy drink often cross-promotes its athletes by mixing them together — riffing on the “fish-out-of-water” routine. Last year, Vickers actually got in the water, taking kayaking lessons from Tao Berman, a world-class paddler. Berman then got to take a couple laps around Lowe’s Motor Speedway under Vickers’ tutelage.

But that was just the beginning of Vickers’ Excellent Red Bull Adventure. He earned his wings with the Red Bull Air Force and then, just two weeks later, hopped in the tandem seat of the Red Bull Edge, a two-seat stunt plane, and grinned through 30 minutes of “aerobatics.”

To the unitiated, aerobatics is flying only in the loosest sense. Vickers’ skydive looks positively laid-back compared to the gut-wrenching, vomit-inducing ride he endured/enjoyed aboard the Red Bull Edge.

Because no matter how terrifying it may be, skydiving is simple. All Vickers did was follow the law of gravity: Everything that goes up must come down.

However, in the Edge, with world-champion aerobatic pilot Kirby Chambliss at the controls, gravity becomes more of a guideline than a rule. Chambliss turned, spun and tossed the tiny blue plane through the sky. When Chambliss is on, the plane looks less like it’s being flown than it’s in the middle of a catastrophic crash. To those familiar with that 1980s classic “Top Gun,” the Edge seems constantly locked in the flat spin that did Goose in.

After the ride, Vickers was shocked at the maneuvers he had endured. A veteran of a 2005 F-14 ride-along, he thought he knew what he was in for.

“The F-14 was faster and could pull sharp turns for longer periods of time, but the Edge was just so nimble. Kirby could do some amazing things that I didn’t think a pilot could.”

Perhaps the hardest part of his Edge ride was surrendering control. Vickers controls his fate at high speed for a living, so just sitting in the cockpit waiting for the next stunt was tough.

“It’s hard not knowing what is coming up, but when you’ve got someone like Kirby at the controls, you learn to just lay back and enjoy the ride.”

If there is one place that Vickers is happy to let someone else man the controls, it’s in the air. Unlike many of his fellow drivers, Vickers is not a licensed pilot and he has no plans to become one.

“I love to fly but I have no interest in putting the weeks, months or even years of time you have to log to become a pilot,” he said. “Anyways, I don’t yearn to fill out all the paperwork and talk to the air traffic controller. I’m happy to let someone else do that.”

Besides, that time could be better spent on his next hobby. Which, after his first jump, just might be skydiving.

“I’m afraid I might have picked up a taste for it,” he said. “But who knows what I’ll be doing next. That’s the most fun — not knowing what kind of stuff I’ll be doing this time next year.”

This article first appeared in the May 2008 issue of NASCAR Illustrated.