Vickers praises Toyota's progress

Vickers currently runs 16th in the championship but has led four of the past five races, being a contender for victory at most of them, while a year ago his team were even struggling to qualify for races.

The 24-year-old has said that besides key personnel changes at the Red Bull Team, improvements made by Toyota in their engine development program have been instrumental to their recent success.

"One thing that I think people don't realize is that - it's not necessarily a good or bad thing, but TRD builds our engines and builds Michael Waltrip engines, and Gibbs builds their own engines," Vickers said.

"You know, TRD has come a long way, I mean, a long way. We started out at the end of last year having a lot of mechanical problems, and NASCAR changed a lot of dimensions for Toyota, which really threw them for a curve ball right at the very last second.

"They were kind of in the Cup Series expecting to run the block they had been running for years in the Truck Series and had to start over basically. That was tough to overcome, but they did a good job."

"You know, we went through a lot of other struggles last year, but this year we've gotten a lot better. Our bottom end power is probably still where we're lacking the most, but the top end power, I think we're right there with the best of them."

Vickers says that having Joe Gibbs Racing with Toyota this season has helped all the other teams working with the Japanese manufacturer, although he reckons that their contribution has only been limited and doesn't explain all the improvement made by the other Toyota teams.

"Gibbs obviously has helped a lot," Vickers added. "Gibbs has had a very successful engine program for many years, and obviously coming to Toyota, you know, there was some new parts to it, but the basic process and building these engines was still the same, and I think they've helped bring the whole pie up a little bit.

"But at the same time, they haven't shared everything. Gibbs is not - they do their own engines. It's not an in-house Toyota engine, so it is a different program."

Only two of the ten Toyota teams that run the whole season are currently outside the top-35 in the owner standings, while a year ago most of them were still having to qualify for races on speed.