Vickers set to get back on fast track after illness

Brian Vickers wanted to know if he would be cleared for practice in a couple of days. The doctor standing in his Washington hospital room last May tried not to laugh.

"I don't know how to tell you this," Vickers recalls the doctor saying, "but it's going to be a long time before you're ever in a race car. If ever."

"If ever" comes Thursday when Vickers, who developed blood clots in his left leg and lungs and needed heart surgery, will drive Red Bull Racing's No. 83 Toyota in a race for the first time in eight months.

Even if he only turns a lap in a Daytona 500 qualifying race, the one-time teammate of Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon is Comeback Driver of the Year.

"I'm at a great place now from a lot of different angles," Vickers, 27, said. "One of them is physical. I've been training a lot. I've pretty much been on a bike or swimming laps or swimming. Spear-fishing 18 or 20 feet down."

Vickers looks strong and healthy. Crew chief Ryan Pemberton notices he's "got some mass to him." He has come a long way from the brink of uncertainty.

Four days before the hospital-room conversation, Vickers led nine laps and finished 10th at Darlington, S.C. There was no indication anything was wrong, Pemberton recalls.

But on a leisure trip to Washington afterward, Vickers began having chest pains in the middle of the night. He tried to go back to sleep, figuring he couldn't possibly be having a heart attack, but the pain got so bad he could barely breathe.

A phone call to a doctor resulted in the same advice Vickers could have gotten through Google - get to an emergency room. Doctors found deep vein thrombosis in his left leg and a pulmonary embolism, a combination that can kill without warning.

Vickers eventually was diagnosed with May Thurner Syndrome, in which the iliac artery in the leg puts pressure on the corresponding vein and causes clotting. He had one procedure to close a hole in his heart and a second to install a stent in his iliac vein.

Because he was on blood-thinning medication, Vickers had to miss the rest of the season. Well, he could have raced, but he couldn't have crashed.

Friend and spotter Chris Lambert said it was hard watching Vickers go through "all the steps he went through, from the 'why me,' the anger side of it, the emotional side of it, the 'I'm bored' side of it."

Vickers said he experienced "the whole range of everything you can imagine," and that could apply to his career. He lost boyhood friend Adam Petty to a fatal crash in 2000 and another close friend, Ricky Hendrick, in the Hendrick Motors plane crash in 2004.

In between, Vickers became the youngest Nationwide Series champion at 20 in 2003. He spun out Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. to get his first Sprint Cup win at Talladega in 2006, and he made the Chase for his current team in 2009.

Many drivers have clauses in their contracts that prevent risky endeavors. Red Bull promotes it, and Vickers lives it. He jumps out of planes, rides his motorcycle too fast and hangs out with Travis Pastrana, the crazy man who does things like ride a motorcycle off the rim of the Grand Canyon. A story in Maxim this week portrays him as a hard partier.

Now that he's well again, Vickers has contemplated climbing K2 - the world's most dangerous mountain - and hunting wolves from a helicopter in Russia.

Doctors really don't want him racing again. But that probably needs some context.

"Most doctors would tell you that they'd rather you did not race cars to begin with," Vickers said. "They're like, 'OK, let's really think about this. You skydive and you race cars at 200 mph, and you're asking me about this? Let's address the first problem.' That's kind of their mentality."

Vickers has a simple mentality: He's focused on racing again.