"The Monster Mile"

Dover International Speedway's monster mascot must scale the scoring tower way up high to find the No. 83’s last finish in a Nextel Cup race. Five spots down in the running order from Sunday’s Coca-Cola 600 was Brian Vickers, whose own personal weekly boot camp helped him manage a power-steering problem all the way to a fifth-place finish in NASCAR’s marathon race. It was quite the feat. BV’s not a big guy, and that’s a long time to be muscling a 3,400-pound race car as the sun sinks and soreness sets in. But Brian manned up, and it was Red Bull Racing’s best finish ever. Did we mention that BV led 76 laps and at one point drove the dominant car in the race? That was, however, one top five. Red Bull Racing has many more planned in the future, beginning with this weekend’s visit to “The Monster Mile” — a high-banked, high-speed concrete oval that again will sap all the life out of Brian, teammate AJ Allmendinger and the others. Brian has defeated Dover once before. In the fall of 2003 there, he smoked the Busch Series field in the No. 5 Chevy on his way to the championship.