Last night, I set up what I thought to be a pretty good controller configuration for Re-Volt:

Left: analog left
Right: analog right
Accelerate: A
Reverse: B
Fire: RT
Flip Car: LT
Reposition: LB
Horn: RB
Pause: Start

It allowed me to set the configuration this way, but in-game for some reason nothing happens when I push the left or right triggers. Is this because the game reads them as an axis? Any way around this?

You can use Xpadder or similar to map keyboard keys to the triggers (leaving the other buttons blank since they can be set in-game). This will work for most games that have problems with the triggers.

Note that if the game runs as an administrator (you see a User Account Control prompt at launch) the controller program needs to run as admin as well otherwise it can't interact with the game.