No End in Sight for Danica Patrick's Search for Sprint Cup Success
The jury on Danica Patrick has been out longer than the one in 12 Angry Men, and opinion is even more sharply divided.
A successful 2015 season for Patrick would be great for NASCAR. She has legions of fans who don’t necessarily think she will win but hope so. She is spunky. She is sexy. She is charismatic.
Imagine if she were successful.
.jpg?w=256 "Colts Jaguars Football")
Patrick, 32, is the only woman ever to have won an IndyCar race. That occurred on April 20, 2008, at Twin Ring Motegi Superspeedway in Motegi City, Japan. She finished fourth in her first Indianapolis 500, becoming the first woman ever to lead at the Brickyard.
Then she became attracted to NASCAR. She hadn’t really conquered IndyCar, but she had become an awfully big name, one NASCAR was naturally interested in wooing. She competed part time in the Nationwide (now Xfinity) Series in 2011, full time in 2012 and didn’t do particularly well but moved up to Sprint Cup anyway.
| Series | Races | Average Start | Average Finish |
| IndyCar | 115 | 12.0 | 10.6 |
| Xfinity | 61 | 17.7 | 21.1 |
| Sprint Cup | 82 | 27.4 | 25.3 |
In two full Sprint Cup seasons, plus 10 races in 2012, Patrick has won a pole but never finished in the top five. She has four top-10 finishes. Along the way, she has had every failure rationalized and every 12th-place finish praised. She has always said, and not without justification, that she is gradually getting better, but her improvement has been only slightly faster than continental drift. She is in the final year of her contract and could use a tectonic shift. Patrick has not been the earthquake many expected.
Patrick says she isn’t going away. Speaking to Adam Alexander on Fox Sports 1's NASCAR Race Hub on January 27, she said:
"Well, I ain’t getting any younger, and I don’t know how many times I can change my career, so as long as I have the confidence of (co-owners) Tony Stewart and Gene (Haas), and the people around me [who] are working with me, and the support of my sponsors…as long as I have their support and confidence…I’m not going to F1 anytime soon. That’s for sure.
"
Recently, the co-owner of her team, Gene Haas, told a gathering of reporters at the annual Charlotte Motor Speedway Media Tour that he wanted Patrick back and was negotiating with her sponsor, GoDaddy, for a return in 2016, per Jared Turner of Fox Sports. Haas’s remarks might have been more newsworthy had there been any chance at all he would say anything else, and some of what he said stretched the bounds of rational belief.
“Everything changes in this sport,” Haas said of Patrick. “I think she’s done good. Look at, like, a Joey Logano. He spent all those years over at Gibbs, and it took him six years to get going, so I don’t think she’s that far off the mark. She’s probably right on the mark, really.”
Really?
All Logano and Patrick have in common are high expectations when they got to NASCAR. Logano is eight years younger. Last year, he blossomed into stardom, winning five Cup races and finishing fourth in the title-determining Chase for the Sprint Cup. In the five full seasons preceding 2014, Logano won three races, seven poles, finished in the top five 27 times, collected 60 top-10 finishes and led 660 laps.
In Logano’s worst Cup season, 2011, he placed 24th in the point standings. Patrick’s best was 27th in 2013. By any measure, the difference in equipment is far less than the difference in performance. Patrick drives for a team that has produced two out of the past four Sprint Cup titles, and teammate Kevin Harvick is the reigning champion.
These January 28 remarks from Haas on the media tour were more frank, via Turner:
"She’s a big draw. We want to see Danica succeed as much as anybody does. I think NASCAR wants to see her succeed, so there’s an awful lot of vested interest in having her succeed in this man’s sport, and we’re very fortunate to have someone like Danica here. I think she just brings a lot of attention to not only NASCAR but SHR (Stewart-Haas Racing) and the whole racing venue.
"
Wonder what the “whole racing venue” is. Probably Daytona, huh?
Perhaps Patrick is still learning, and even if the curve is slow, she will eventually get the hang of it. The fact is, she is the beneficiary of an opportunity that few young drivers get. The list of NASCAR drivers who have had what baseball players call “a cup of coffee in the bigs” is similarly long. Take a look at all the drivers who were once touted as having great promise, only to see it unfulfilled. Most didn’t get a shot for as long as Patrick or in equipment as strong.
Larry Pearson, Steve Grissom and Jeff Green were all Busch (now Xfinity) Series champions. Sam Hornish Jr. and Dario Franchitti, IndyCar champions. Reed Sorenson, David Ragan and Landon Cassill are among those still out there, racing up the Sprint Cup Series’ staircase. For every Jimmie Johnson there have been dozens of Randy LaJoies. Many have been virtually forgotten.
Still, the fascination lingers. Given a chance that so many others weren't, can Patrick pull it off? Can she win a race and make a Chase? Is it just a matter of continuing improvement and acclimation, or is it a matter of the Peter Principle (Dr. Laurence J. Peter, who held that, in a hierarchy, people tend to rise to their levels of incompetence) kicking in?
“I just need to keep making progress,” Patrick said, again to Alexander on Race Hub's Jan. 27 broadcast. “I feel like, last year, a lot of good things happened. I ran much better in practice. My restarts got better. All the areas I wanted to improve did. We were all happy for that."
She continued:
"We’ve made some changes that are going to make things more challenging again. Things happen so quickly in the [Sprint] Cup Series that you really need to have good communication with your crew chief because the difference between making good changes in the race weekend itself, leading up to the race, and not, is huge. … If you don’t make any good changes, you don’t really have a good race.
"
The new crew chief, Daniel Knost, succeeded Tony Gibson late last year. Knost is an engineer by trade, with expertise that Patrick lacks in terms of communication. In their first races together, Patrick finished 36th, 22nd and 18th. Kurt Busch, with Gibson switching to his pit-road command center, closed the season with finishes of eighth, seventh and 11th.
After a seventh-place finish last year at Kansas Speedway, Patrick said on the May 13th edition of SportsCenter, “If it was only that easy to know what that magic formula is. I think it shows it’s sitting there. It’s a matter of executing everything really well.”
She still seems to make a lot of little things, such as when she commented, later in the ESPN interview, about a single pass of six-time Sprint Cup champion Johnson:
"I had quite a moment when I did that. I thought, well, I’ve got stop thinking about that. I need to look forward, but I sent him a message, and he texted me back and said ‘good job.’ I said, I hope you know, with all due respect, my favorite moment in that race was when I drove around you on the outside on that restart. He said ‘not a problem,’ and he said he remembered when he was young, racing with Jeff Gordon, and he was really honored that I could be that driver.
"
It wasn’t like Patrick nipped him at the line to win the Daytona 500. She passed him on a restart in the latter stages of a race in which he wound up ninth. For Patrick really to emerge, such deeds must become commonplace.
America and NASCAR have been waiting with bated breath for an awfully long time.
.jpg?w=480 "Colts Jaguars Football")
