Channeling Invincibility

Team Red Bull manager Jay Frye likes to use film clips to motivate his team. This time, he brought the movie itself.

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Vince Papale, here in Philadelphia, was a surprise guest for Team Red Bull.

As the two hundred employees of Red Bull Racing filed into Mooresville's AmStar Cinemas on Thursday, they didn't question why they were being summoned to a movie theater on a crisp weekday morning.

They were just glad to be out of the raceshop.

During this most bizarre of NASCAR off-seasons, every Cup team enters February exhausted, stir crazy and more than a little sick of looking at each other. The absence of Daytona testing has meant twice as many people hanging around the shop and most teams have likened their round-the-clock winter to two-a-days in football.

"We've just been here banging on each other for the last two months," explained Team Red Bull general manager Jay Frye. "So I thought it was a good idea to give everyone a break for a morning."

Unbeknownst to the team, Frye had also arranged for a little extra motivation to kick-start their season less than one week before heading south for Speedweeks.

"You all know that we as a team like to watch clips of movies to get motivated," he told the team as they settled into their seats at 9:00 AM, popcorn in hand. "Well, this year our expectations are higher, so we're going to watch an entire movie. And the star of the film wears number 83 just as our car does. Enjoy…"

And with that, the lights dimmed and the 2006 box office smash Invincible flickered to life.

When bartender/school teacher Vince Papale (played by Mark Wahlberg) comes home to find his wife gone, Team Red Bull boos. When he makes the Philadelphia Eagles roster, they smile. And when he scores an improbable touchdown against the New York Giants, they cheer.

Standing in the darkness of theater, where he could see the screen but the audience couldn't see him, the real Vince Papale quickly wiped away a tear before anyone saw that he was crying.

"I lost my Dad a few years ago," the 62-year old whispered in the darkness as the credits began to roll. "When I see him being played up in the big screen, it gets me every time."

"I lost my Dad a few years ago," the 62-year old whispered in the darkness as the credits began to roll.

"When I see him being played up in the big screen, it gets me every time. Now let's go motivate some people…"

As the lights came up, Frye stepped out in front of his assembled team. By now they all knew that the boss was prone to give a locker room speech from time to time. They knew that he'd played a little football himself, lettering as a tight end and offensive lineman at Missouri. Some even knew he'd worn number 83, the same as Papale, the same as Brian Vickers's Red Bull Toyota and the same as Kellen Winslow, the Tiger tight end that preceded him at Mizzou ("My number is retired at Missouri," Frye likes to say, "Some say they retired it for him…but I'm not so sure").

What they didn't know was that Frye wasn't the one that would be speaking this morning. And any concerns that the big secret might have been leaked were wiped away by the stunned looks on their faces when Papale came running out onto the stage in front of them.

"I knew something was up," said Cup rookie driver Scott Speed, who hit it off with Papale, despite his allegiance to the San Francisco 49ers, "But I had no idea that the man himself was coming out!"

"Alright!" Papale screamed as the crews gave him a standing ovation, getting him so fired up that he fired off an expletive and then apologized for it. "I was back in the back just now…and I felt like I was back in the tunnel at the stadium. If I'd had a helmet on I would have been banging my head against the wall back there!"

He talked about how excited he was to go tour the shop and watch the guys "do their thing". He chattered on about his invite from Frye to come see the team at Daytona after he left the Super Bowl in Tampa and the Space Shuttle Endeavor launch at Cape Canaveral ("Best week ever, man!") And he talked about how his father was a huge race fan and how they used to go to stock car races at old JFK Stadium in Philly (the very stadium where he tried out for the Iggles) and even made it out to see the big NASCAR stars race at treacherous Langhorne Speedway, aka "The Track That Ate The Heroes".

Ryan McGee

Papale talks shop while at the shop.

Papale dropped some Dick Vermeil coachspeak ("Nobody ever drowned to death in sweat") and got in a shot at another motivational football movie ("Rudy? He made what, two tackles? I played in the league four years"). He even brought along his former teammate, training camp roommate and Eagle center Denny Franks. In the film, Franks is the guy who jerks Vince onto the floor of their dorm room and teaches him how to anticipate the play that's coming by looking at his opponent's knuckles.

On Thursday morning Franks, now the co-owner of a successful Internet distribution company in Greensboro, NC, got down on the floor of the AmStar Cinemas and did the same demonstration. (Apparently they don't have the same sticky stuff on the floors in Mooresville that we do everywhere else.)

After a quick lunch, Hurricane Vince was blowing around the floor of the raceshop, his son Vinny in tow, snapping photos with fabricators and exchanging fitness tips, and perhaps Hollywood gossip, with jack man and former Dartmouth hockey player Shaun Peet, who also played a jack man in Talladega Nights.

By the time Papale headed out the door for Tampa, the long, tired winter faces around the Red Bull Racing headquarters had been transformed into a building full of smiling-hard workers, ready to take on the long odds of fielding two cars, a rookie driver and a still-new team against the juggernauts of Roush, Hendrick, Gibbs and Childress.

"It's no different than taking a four-win Philadelphia Eagles team and having them in the playoffs three years later," Papale said with a smile that Marky Mark could only dream of. That's what we did."

How?

"You gotta feel invincible."

Somehow we knew he was going to say that.

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