Red Bull Racing's Ryan Pemberton continues to roll with the changes of NASCAR

By Rea White - Associate Editor

Monday, December 21, 2009

Red Bull Racing crew chief Ryan Pemberton (left) talks to his driver Brian Vickers at California's Auto Club Speedway in February.

Mark Sluder
NASCAR Scene

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Ryan Pemberton can't really remember a time when he didn't make his living in racing. He has been working on cars and in shops since he was a teenager, coming into NASCAR behind older brother Robin Pemberton.

These days, he's the crew chief of Red Bull Racing's Brian Vickers, leading a third-year team that won its first race this season and made NASCAR's Chase For The Sprint Cup for the first time.

As he looks over his career, the 40-year-old Pemberton sees a sport that has changed dramatically - and one that he still seems pleased to be a part of.

As a teenager, he watched his brother Robin, who is now NASCAR’s vice president of competition, work with a series of high-profile drivers and then went to work with him, helping out around what is now the Roush Fenway Racing shop.

"Kid looks up to his big brother," Pemberton says, recalling that he was around 17 when he started working in the shop. "I always liked cars and was mechanically inclined and always liked working on stuff from a young age. It kind of made sense. Competitive background and liked competing. Some of the things you've got to like. You've got to like competition. You've got to like fixing things, making things better, being better at them than the next guy, all those things are just kind of a trait that you need to be good at this in racing.

"It was fairly natural to like it and go into it. And I'm very fortunate to have the opportunity and situation I was in at a young age to be involved in it."

After working his way up the ranks, Pemberton got his chance to work for a while as a crew chief in what is now the Nationwide Series and then moved into the Cup ranks in 1997. He earned his first career pole with Ernie Irvan in 1988 and his first victory with Joe Nemechek at Kansas in 2004.

He joined Red Bull for the 2009 season, and he and Vickers seem to have clicked at the same time that the organization, which got its start in the 2007 season with incoming manufacturer Toyota, began to hit its stride.

The team earned its first career win at Michigan International Speedway in August and closed the season with 13 top-10 finishes, all before the 10-race, championship-determining Chase For The Sprint Cup began.

While the team didn’t necessarily get the results they hoped for within the Chase, finishing 12th, it learned a lot and gained significant ground overall.

Now, it heads into next season with a vastly different set of expectations, especially from those outside the organization.

"I think it shows potentially what we're capable of,” Pemberton says of the 2009 season. “I think it raises expectations, and I think it heightens and focuses on the commitment that everybody has got to make to all of this going forward. I think this season went well, for the most part. Just being able to raise the bar and raise our goals and be realistic."

Their goals for 2010?

"Obviously, we want to continue some of the things we were doing, that was running well, qualifying well and win more races and qualify for the Chase,” he says. “Do everything just a little bit better then we did this year. Sitting on six poles, that was something that will be hard to top next year, but all the other areas I think we're realistically capable of topping."

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."