Frye bringing substance to Red Bull's established style

LAS VEGAS -- His job used to entail getting on the phone and asking for money, searching for funding for an organization that was running out of it. He used to worry about whether or not he'd be able to make payroll. Near the end, he had to walk down to the shop floor, face men and women he had shared hopes and expectations with, and tell many of them that they no longer had jobs.

No wonder Jay Frye feels refreshed, and looks forward to going to work every day. These days, as general manager and vice president of Red Bull Racing, his biggest concerns involve whether his two cars can make a race. There are no more worries about whether he'll have adequate funding, if any at all. There are no more worries about losing primary sponsorship. And there are no worries that his team will suddenly evaporate from underneath him, as happened last year when Frye was general manager and minority owner of Ginn Racing.

"You come to work every day to get better, as opposed to, what are we going to do to survive that day? It's a whole different deal," Frye said inside a Red Bull hauler Friday at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. "The first couple of weeks it was kind of like, it's OK -- we can make this work. Every time you start something new, there are always these hidden doors you're not aware of. Well, this gets better every day."

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Jay Frye

At Red Bull, Frye takes over day-to-day operations of a two-car organization that failed to make 32 races in its debut season last year. Both Red Bull cars still have yet to make the starting field at the same time in 2008; after failing to make the Daytona 500 and never getting the chance at California because of rain, A.J. Allmendinger was the last driver knocked out Friday in qualifying for the UAW-Dodge 400. But there have been small signs of progress, notably a pair of top-12 finishes to start this season by Vickers, who had only five of them all last year.

What a coincidence that these strides coincide with the arrival of Frye, a former football player at the University of Missouri who brought 16 years of racing experience to a team whose inexperience showed glaringly at times last year. Red Bull was seen as the team that had the cool hospitality facility and threw the best parties, but was often out of its depth on the racetrack. Frye brings a certain degree of substance to a team that beforehand had only been known for its style.

As soon as he took the job, Frye saw the hurdles -- too much emphasis on getting inside the top 35, too many mechanical basics left uncovered. Vickers said the team didn't have notes, didn't have telemetry, didn't have test data, all tools that established teams use with regularity. They were so green, Vickers added, they didn't figure out how to use tire data until this year. How did they figure setups? "At a lot of places, it was a complete guess," he said. Enter Frye, who saw a team with plenty of engineering capabilities, but lacking the basics needed to use them.

"We have to block and tackle," he said. "We have all this great engineering stuff, and it's a very engineering-driven company, and it's all very good. But if you don't do this right, you're never going to get to that. You're never going to be able to use these great resources we have engineering-wise. That's what I tried to bring in, just the day-to-day blocking and tackling, getting the basics right. If you have the slickest car in the world, the best aerodynamic numbers, and a bolt breaks, it doesn't matter how slick your car is or how good your wind tunnel numbers were. You've got to make sure you've got that stuff right. That's really what I've tried to do. It's not starting over, it's just kind of redirecting some of our energy in a different direction." (Continued)