Patrick Poised to Strike for IndyCar Success
Written by Allan Brewer · February 10, 2007
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Photo: RonMcQueeneyIRL
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Danica Patrick Takes New Team, Challenges In Stride
IndyCar Jewels Come in Small Packages
by Allan Brewer
allan@fastmachines.com
Danica Patrick’s off-season move to Andretti Green Racing has done nothing to diminish her star-power. Entering her third IndyCar season and still learning, she sees greater opportunity to get her first victory with a new, fully supportive, team and teammates behind her.
“There are only two true sports: bullfighting and auto racing. The rest are simply games,” wrote America’s greatest journalist and sportsman, Ernest Hemingway.
The late bearded master was far from a feminist, but he probably would approve as a thin, tanned member of the opposite sex pads silently into the media center alongside a large, watchful male team representative who runs interference, directs her to an open lane, and otherwise partners her on a determined path to the microphone.
As she moves there’s a pause in the room’s chatter and heads turn to watch this diminutive young lady, with the jet black hair flowing down her back and the exquisitely manicured nails, make her way to the front of the room and the raised stage where she’ll soon hold a queen’s court.
With a tigress’ quiet strength she ascends to the podium, bedecked in a blue and black racing suit, and in a no-baloney tone of voice answers that persistent question with the same response she’s uttered a hundred times before: “Well, I obviously want to win. I want to win soon, and I want to get it over with, so I don’t have to answer anymore questions about it.”
Welcome to the modern-day, equal-opportunity fairy-tail-come-true that is the racing career of tiny Danica Patrick, no doubt American open-wheel racing’s best-recognized public face and, to some, a woman whose accomplishments can never live up to the expectations.
At five feet tall in racing boots and all of a trim hundred pounds in substance, Danica Patrick enters her third full season of IndyCar racing with a newly-won seat at Andretti Green Racing, a generous sponsorship and a distinctive-looking Batmobile-like racecar that Motorola has made possible.
She earned the ride with a highly competent eighty percent finish rate in the thirty races she’s started to date, a nineteen-lap tour at the head of the Indy 500 field and Rookie of the Year honors in 2005, and with two fourth places finishes (at Milwaukee and Nashville) that probably represent the best race performances of her career in an uncompetitive Panoz car during a disappointing 2006 campaign.
Despite the fame that comes of appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated, ESPN The Magazine and in All-Star SuperBowl commercials the Roscoe, Illinois native still approaches the “only true sport” with the same purposeful attitude of a yet-fed big cat.
“I can’t imagine that I feel any different than anyone else who hasn’t won their first race. It’s one of those things when I finally do it’s going to be such a relief.”
“I think that I’m hired because I’m a driver and because I can do a good job. I need to do my best, but I don’t necessarily know what that’s going to give me. I hope a win. I hope running up front,” she says with a genuine frankness that many drivers would never approach, or their teams and backers allow them to share.
“I just have to give it my all. If I fall short of there, then that’s my fault.”
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The Motorola Car. Photo: Allan Brewer
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Patrick’s critics look to the absence of a win on her resume as a mortal flaw when the twenty-four year old takes to the track or the studio.
Despite the well-recited figure of an average thirty-four starts for an IndyCar driver’s first trip to Victory Lane, and the prominent placement of one current driver now well into fifty-plus races without a first-place finish, Danica’s fledgling big-car career seems to stir greater-than-average passion among her detractors.
Their disquiet probably grew during the recent Daytona International Speedway open test in which Patrick struggled to adjust to her purpose-built Dallara/Honda road course machine for the first time over the combined 2.72 mile infield and oval circuit.
For starters, Patrick had problems with the molded Kevlar seat insert made to fit her one-of-a-kind frame, losing much of her first morning of practice as she and the AGR team scrambled for a solution to the problem.
“It was tough,” she said afterwards. “We didn’t make a very good seat for this road course car. We made some good adjustments but I didn’t get out until after lunch (of the first day) because the seat didn’t fit right.”
“On a road course, especially, it’s important to be comfortable. You’re constantly pushing the limit. It’s not like on a mile and a half oval where you put your foot down and go,” she said.
Eventually the team reverted to another, but older, seat component to get her aboard and moving forward in the Florida practice sessions. Still, she lagged on the time charts
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6 Responses to “Patrick Poised to Strike for IndyCar Success”
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I hate to correct you, but the season long illness didn’t happen to Ray Leto, her engineer, it happened to team GM Scott Roembke.
she is a tough cookie and will win her ist race this season maybe at the corn track U GO GIRL
Damon, you are absolutely correct–it was Scott who was ill.
Thanks for pointing that out.
Correction made.
Apologies to Ray, who did indeed look fit and well at Daytona last week.
Go Danica, kick some butt!! ‘She has a weight advantage’ Stop looking for excuses about why she drives better and bring your A game guys…here she comes…
Here’s another comment I’ll toss out to you guys:
Danica’s reached a point where she could easily live off modeling and endorsements by driving in a less dangerous auto racing series if she cared to.
But she’s still lacing them up and putting her life on the line in an IndyCar to get that first win.
I like her determination and admire her courage by hanging in there.
I hope she brings home the bacon real soon and gets the monkey off her back.
Of course she has a weight advantage! Boo freakin’ hoo! The rules are written to favor smaller drivers. And it isn’t “the Danica rule” - Tony Kanaan is built like a jockey and lots of other IndyCar drivers are small. In some club racing classes the rules are different and light drivers don’t have an advantage. I doubt Danica was whining about it when she raced with those rules.