Team Red Bull Preview - Atlanta - March 4, 2009

RED BULLS BUILDING MOMENTUM - Despite two engine changes after qualifying, a mid-race battery change on the No. 83 and the No. 82 fighting for the free pass, Red Bull Racing Team had its best showing of the NASCAR Sprint Cup season last weekend in Las Vegas.

No. 83 driver Brian Vickers finished eighth in Sunday's Shelby 427 for his second top-10 finish in as many weeks. He has gained 23 positions in points (now 17th) in the past two weeks since the season-opening Daytona 500.

Teammate Scott Speed ended up 21st for the best finish of his rookie season. His No. 82 Red Bull Toyota ranks 37th in the car owner standings - only eight points from cracking the top 35.

"The whole Red Bull team is working hard," Vickers said. "And you get strong finishes when the team is working together instead of getting worked up over things like changing an engine before the race and a battery during the race. We really do have the total package at the intermediate tracks."

Which leads us to 1.54-mile Atlanta Motor Speedway - site of Sunday's Kobalt Tools 500. Vickers owns four top 10s in 11 starts there, including two in the past four races. Speed made his NASCAR debut at Atlanta in last March's Camping World Truck event and has one start in the Cup car, finishing 34th last fall.

SPEED GOES SCRATCHING - With his ear on the Winter Music Conference later this month in Miami, Scott Speed is taking DJ lessons on Thursday in midtown Atlanta. He'll hook up with DJ TD - short for music mixer Tim DeGroot - for the first of several scratch sessions that Speed has planned before the March 23-25 Winter Music Conference.

"He's going to spend some time working with me to teach me the basics of DJ'ing," said Speed, whose favorite artists include DJ Tiesto, Timbaland, Lupe Fiasco, Kanye West and Placebo. "I've already been working on some stuff on my own with DJ equipment in my basement, so I'm hoping DJ TD will have some good stuff to add to what I'm learning.

"I just like doing as much as I can. Life's short - I want to do all of it."

The WMC is a weeklong electronic music event held every March since the mid- 1980s in south Florida. The event moved to Miami Beach in 1991 and was considered a major catalyst in the establishment of the South Beach club scene. WMC draws more than 3,500 music industry participants and 62,000 event participants from 70 countries.

RED BULL SNOW STORIES - Snow fell last March when the Sprint Cup Series visited Atlanta, and a blustery morning brought back memories of 1993 when the infamous "White Hurricane" swallowed the East Coast.

Red Bull Racing Team's two former Nationwide Series drivers - competition director Elton Sawyer and No. 82 spotter Tim Fedewa - remember the weekend like it was yesterday.

"It was like 60 or 70 degrees on Friday," Sawyer said. "We came in Saturday and there was like 10 or 12 inches of snow. It was amazing. They were snowed out on Saturday and Sunday and came back the next weekend to run the race."

"Literally," Fedewa exaggerated, "we got 18 or 19 inches. The wind was blowing 30 or 40 miles per hour. It was just a whiteout. It was a blizzard. The whole town of Atlanta was shut down. Just to come to the track and see that - no one could move. It was just a very weird-looking situation. I just moved down from Michigan, and to see snow was no big deal for me. But to see it in Atlanta …"

For the record, the forecast for this weekend calls for partly cloudy skies with highs in the low 70s.

THE AIR UP THERE - What did you do between the West Coast races in Fontana and Las Vegas?

Brian Vickers jumped out of a perfectly safe airplane a few times and had a blast doing it with the Red Bull Air Force. Sporting his Red Bull firesuit, he fell free in the skies above Perris, Calif.