Danica Patrick's Finish at Martinsville Shows She's Turning the Corner in NASCAR

Maybe the holdout non-believers will finally start having some faith in Danica Patrick.

Patrick’s seventh-place finish in Sunday’s STP 500 at Martinsville Speedway tied her second-best career Sprint Cup performance (seventh at Kansas last spring).

What’s more, she climbed the most positions of any driver in the Sprint Cup Series after Sunday’s race, vaulting from 23rd into a tie for 16th with Jeff Gordon and Carl Edwards.

After six races in the 2015 season, Patrick has now left three of those races ranked inside the Top 20.

And tied for 16th equals her second-best post-race place in the standings—other than for the one week when she ranked seventh in the points after finishing eighth in the 2013 season-opening Daytona 500.

Add all those numbers together, and it’s looking like Patrick is starting to make some serious forward progress.

And at the right time, I might add, given that she’s in the final year of her current contract with Stewart-Haas Racing. There’s no better way to get a new contract or extension than by starting to come through with decent performances.

Patrick even saw something at Martinsville that she rarely has in her Sprint Cup career to date: she was at the front of the pack, with no one in front of her, on the front row for a restart in the race.

While yes, she did fade back, she still managed to hang tough and stay within the top 10, ultimately recording her seventh-place finish.

From what I've seen thus far, I do believe Patrick is starting to see positive signs of advancement. I was not going to be surprised if she had a good showing Sunday at Martinsville.

Sure enough, she did. It was not a fluke, in my mind. I keep on saying—and will continue to say—that if Patrick is to win her first career Sprint Cup race, it’s going to be on a short track like Martinsville, Bristol, Richmond, Phoenix or New Hampshire.

Admittedly, those same positive signs I spoke of a moment ago aren’t neon billboard-like signs, and while I may be in the minority, I still truly believe she finally is starting to get what she hadn’t gotten in the first two full-time seasons of her Sprint Cup career.

She seems more motivated, more focused, more intent on moving upward in the track and yes, she’s even more aggressive behind the wheel—rather than reverting to a defensive demeanor as she has done in the past when things have gone wrong on the track.

Patrick, now 33, has proven to be a good thing for NASCAR. She’s attracted countless new female fans—both young and old.

She has become a good ambassador for the sport and, to her credit, really plays up her role as a leader, mentor and organizer of sorts.

She’s also inspiring a number of young females who want to follow in her firesuit and become race car drivers themselves.

On the one hand, it’s good that the series now pauses for an upcoming off-weekend for Easter, allowing team members to spend some long-overdue time with their families.

On the other hand, I’m somewhat sad that she won’t be able to continue her momentum a week later. Now, if she’s to continue showing that she truly is for real, we’ll have to wait nearly two weeks until the Saturday night race at Texas Motor Speedway on April 11.

If you need another example of how Patrick is improving, consider her evasive move to miss a spinning Paul Menard about two-thirds of the way through the race.

In her first or second season, she might have been collected with Menard. But not Sunday. She smartly swerved to her right—perhaps anticipating what was about to transpire—and missed Menard’s spinning Chevy.

“The 27 (Menard) got sideways and he was just completely sideways in front of my car, and luckily I had slowed down enough and swerved to the right,” Patrick said in a Chevrolet media release.

Matt Sullivan/Getty Images

“It’s all a matter of luck, too. I could have got drilled from the back and hit into the car. I could have swerved to the right and had somebody clip my right rear and spun, somebody could have been out there.

“Crashes are about observing where you’re at and making a good decision about where to go, but they’re also about luck. I got lucky that there was nothing in my way to get around that one. That would have probably wrecked my day.”

Instead, Patrick made a deft move with an equally deft amount of confidence that that showed a side we haven’t seen much of during her career.

And instead of wrecking her day as she’s experienced so many times already, she showed great fortitude, confidence and ability, and came away with a finish that gives greater optimism of even bigger and better things to come.

Follow me on Twitter @JerryBonkowski