With the season opener Daytona and one-mile anomaly Phoenix under his belt, Brian Vickers heads into Sunday’s race in Las Vegas needing to establish speed on the first of 17 intermediate track races this season.
In seven career starts at Las Vegas, Vickers has only notched two top-10s and led one lap. His best intermediate track finish last season was an eighth at Texas, followed by a tenth at Atlanta. Other 1.5-mile tracks produced less favorable results. To improve on this season’s rough start, the driver of the No. 55 Aaron’s Dream Machine Toyota will have to replicate what he did in his two races at Texas and Atlanta last year.
Thirtieth and 25th place finishes at Daytona and Phoenix have left Vickers sitting 25th in the standings. While points position two races into the season may not be indicative of what’s to come, it’s enough to raise questions regarding his on-track performance.
Health (he missed the last four races last season due to blood clots) may be the biggest question mark regarding Vickers’ short-term future as a full-time driver, but avoiding contact with other drivers and the wall should top his list of somewhat controllable priorities.
He was effectively taken out of the Daytona 500 when he got caught on the wrong side of a wreck initiated by rookies Austin Dillon and Kyle Larson. One week later in Phoenix, a blown right-front tire sent Vickers hard into the wall early in the race. While the sometimes overly aggressive driver Vickers may have fallen to the destructive power of outside forces, it is still worth noting that the historically accident-prone driver has managed to bang up his car in both races thus far in 2014.
Of the 17 races he ran last season, he logged five DNFs, four coming as results of wrecks. Considering he is slated to run more than twice that amount of races this year, he cannot afford to match that race-to-DNF ratio, which would project upwards of ten DNFs this season.
A high percentage of DNFs can be the make-or-break statistic when team owners are considering signing a driver to an upcoming season. One way for a part-time driver to cover up such an ugly statistic is to win a race, and so Vickers did. His victory at New Hampshire was the first win at a non-restrictor plate track by a part-time driver since Jamie McMurray’s win at Charlotte in 2002.
But now the part-time underdog of last year is a full-time driver on a competitive team. At Michael Waltrip Racing, finishing consistently is a goal both within reach and expected.
The new points system, however, emphasizes winning over finishing consistently. Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kevin Harvick have essentially grabbed themselves Chase spots with their wins at the first two races this season, and Vickers, too, can benefit from this system by exhibiting his proven ability to win.
Regardless, in order to win, a driver must avoid trouble, and with a rookie class of eight drivers this year, chances are there will be plenty of trouble to go around in the rear of the pack each week.
At Daytona and Phoenix, Vickers ran several laps in the top-10. If he and crew chief Billy Scott can avoid slipping back into the crash-prone part of the field, then Vickers will be fortunate enough to watch the majority of the on-track melees in his rear-view mirror.
But to be fortunate is to be lucky, and 43 drivers will be hoping for a stroke of luck this weekend in Vegas.
Unfortunately for some, the laws of probability say that not everyone can come away a winner.
