“As everything falls into place for everyone else, I’m still waiting,” Allmendinger said.
Allmendinger’s situation is unique to the NASCAR garage. Red Bull not only sponsors his team, it owns the team, too. Executives at Red Bull’s Austrian headquarters make the final decision on its athletes, and are rarely around to banter with.
That, in turn, creates a disconnect with its Mooresville, N.C.-based NASCAR team, Allmendinger says, and ultimately leaves him wondering whether Red Bull plans to pick up the option on his current contract.
It has yet to do so, he said, and the window of opportunity in the NASCAR garage is closing. Typically by mid-August drivers must know their fate. Early September is often too late to be looking for work, and Allmendinger fears the “F1 mentality” of Red Bull Austria—i.e. an early fall decision—could leave him without an opportunity.
The assumption in the garage is that I’m back at Red Bull, but they have the option and haven’t picked it up yet,” Allmendinger said. “I want to be here. When they put [Mike] Skinner in the car, I easily could’ve said ‘[Forget] this, I’m tired of it.’ But I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to improve, and I feel like I’ve done that. I want to drive for Red Bull.”
“Over the past couple of weeks I think I’ve been able to show my peers I can run up front,” said Allmendinger, who finished 10th at the Brickyard and then 19th at Pocono.
“That team is better than it’s ever been, and AJ is better than he’s ever been,” said Jay Frye, GM of Red Bull’s NASCAR program. “That means results on the track. He must continue to have results.”
The main obstacle Allmendinger faces is teammate Scott Speed, the former Red Bull Formula One driver who has experienced notable success in both the Craftsman Truck Series (he won at Dover earlier this year) and ARCA.
| 
|