Brian Vickers suffered second degree burns to his feet when an exhaust pipe broke midway through the 500-mile race at Bristol Motor Speedway.

“We think that a piece of the tail pipe came off halfway through the race, so heat was blowing directly onto the floor board,” Vickers said. “The guys tried to put some lining in the car to protect my feet, but it didn’t really help that much. I basically had to run the whole race with my feet burning and that was just painful.”

Vickers finished 15th in Sunday’s race, despite the smoke and carbon monoxide fumes that filled his cockpit for the final 200 laps at Bristol. He needed immediate medical attention and received oxygen while still in the car.

He went for a long bicycle ride on Monday to help his body rid the carbon monoxide, but had to do it standing up because his buttocks were slightly burned from the heat in the car.

Red Bull officials were prepared to pull teammate A.J. Allmendinger from his car to replace Vickers on Sunday, but Vickers insisted on finishing the race.

Got to be a tough season as it is, dealing with Toyota’s growing pains in its first year in NEXTEL Cup, without having to drive 250 miles or so with your ass and feet on fire. Nice job, Mr. Vickers.

“I’ve said the whole time, whether I like the car or not, we are going to do our best to be competitive. I don’t care what the car is.”

The COTs seemed to agree with Toyota as well, as they managed to qualify five drivers for the race, by far their best showing so far this season. A.J. Allmendinger and Jeremy Mayfield are making their first starts of the 2007 season, along with Dave Blaney, Brian Vickers, and Dale Jarrett (who actually managed to race his way in for once and didn’t have to use one of his rapidly dwindling past champion provisionals).

Noticeably absent, again, was Michael Waltrip, who didn’t qualify for the 4th straight week. Mikey is still stilling at -27 in points, after that whole rocket fuel incident at Daytona, and is struggling to find much of a silver lining so far. I mean, hell, I’m currently ahead of Mikey in the driver standings, with 0 points, and that’s never a good thing to be trailing me in the standings after five races.

The other big news is that despite much speculation otherwise by nearly everyone, Mark Martin made good on his word and is sitting out Bristol, sticking to the plans for him to race only a part-time schedule this year. I’d personally like to see him out there, making one last run for a championship, but good for him for easing out of racing to spend more time with his family, and to just take a break and enujoy life a bit. He’s got every reason to abandon that plan, so it seems all the more important to him, to be faced with the chance to make one last run but to turn his back on it for the things that are more important to him.