“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.

“I think that if he’s smart, he’ll do what’s best for him and I hope that’s at DEI, I really do,” Gordon said during a press event for Hendrick Motorsports. “Is that reality? I think it’s gone too far. When it gets ugly in the media, it’s usually very, very difficult to rebound from that.”

“I think that you’ve got a little stubbornness going on there,” Gordon said. “Junior is in the seat to be able to write his own ticket, he can do whatever he wants. He can go to any team, he can start his own team, he’s got the sponsors who are going to back him, the fans that are going to back him.

“He’s really in the power position, and if Teresa is not recognizing that, then shame on her … if she doesn’t recognize that DEI will have a tough time surviving without Junior, I think she’s making a big mistake.”

Hard to argue with that, on all sorts of levels. It’s pretty rare to see any contract situation in professional sports that has escalated to public sniping at one another like that get resolved happily in the end.

One of ‘em probably has to go at this point, and Teresa doesn’t seem too eager to simply turn everything over to Junior, so it may very well be Junior that leaves DEI for new digs, whether with another team or starting a team of his own.