Girl Power | Danica Patrick: Why she'll succeed in NASCAR, and why she won't
Girl Power
Danica Patrick: Why she’ll succeed in NASCAR, and why she won’t
- By: Bob Pockrass
- Thursday February 06, 2010
After months of hype and anticipation, Danica Patrick will finally race a stock car when she takes the green flag Saturday in the Lucas Oil Slick Mist 200 ARCA race at Daytona. Though the debate over how she’ll fare in NASCAR will continue beyond Saturday, at least there finally will be a track record.
The great debate is this: Whether the Izod Indy Racing Series star can make the transition to NASCAR. It’s a big question because her racing career has been much like her GoDaddy.com commercials – part accomplishment, part tease.
She will get her first taste of stock-car racing Saturday, but before fans jump to conclusions they should remember that success in ARCA at Daytona is not a great predictor of success in NASCAR. For example, John Wes Townley finished fourth in last year’s ARCA race, but went on to have a rough 2009 season in the Nationwide Series.
Crew chief Tony Eury Jr. says 15th-place finishes would be considered successful in Patrick’s 12- or 13-race Nationwide schedule, which will begin either Feb. 13 at Daytona or Feb. 20 at Auto Club Speedway in California. JR Motorsports team co-owner Dale Earnhardt Jr. just wants to see flashes of brilliance and see her run up front.
“She’s got every opportunity in the world,” Eury Jr. says. “She can be as big as she wants it to be. If she goes out and wins the first race, it will be the biggest thing that ever happened in the sport. If she doesn’t, some people will say some other IRL guys tried it [and struggled].”
For fans, her success will be determined by her performance on the track, by whether she can run in the top 20 and, ultimately, whether or not she can win.
But another measure of success will come from her impact on television ratings, attendance and exposure for the sport.
“You take someone with the profile that Danica has and the attention that she attracts, that doesn’t hurt. … It doesn’t hurt us to have good story lines,” NASCAR President Mike Helton says. “And this certainly is a good story line.”
Patrick also has a major marketing machine behind her. She is represented by IMG – the same company that manages megastars such as Tiger Woods, Justin Timberlake and Peyton Manning.
“It’s very big,” says IMG’s Mark Dyer, a former NASCAR executive who handles Patrick’s business. “We love to be associated with elite athletes, great leaders and great figures in the celebrity world and the sports world. The best of the best is what we like to affiliate with. Danica is such a trailblazer as a race-car driver and sports celebrity.”
So will she be successful? That’s the great debate.
Here are five reasons she will. And since the jury’s still out, five reasons why she won’t.
5 reasons she will succeed:
- She’s doing it on her own terms
The more time she spends in a stock car, the better she’s going to be, so she’s not going to learn as much in a 13-race schedule as she would over a full, 35-race schedule. She is taking a long break from the Feb. 27 race at Las Vegas to the June 26 race at New Hampshire.
The 27-year-old Patrick truly doesn’t know if she really wants to do this, so she has created no high expectations for herself. She says she can walk away at any time if she doesn’t like it. That’s easier to do when you are running a limited schedule.
If she were committed full time, there would be more pressure and she likely would wonder if she gave up on her goal of winning the Indianapolis 500 too soon.
Patrick is first and foremost an IndyCar driver, and that’s where she has the most pressure. She’s expected to perform there; that’s what she’s dedicated her life to. Her dreams have been about winning Indy 500s, not Daytona 500s – she didn’t even know until she tested at Daytona last month that the track was 2.5 miles long.
Mentally and emotionally, this is the best way to go. Her approach creates less pressure.
“It’s really just a matter of where my heart is,” Patrick says. “That’s really how I’ve always played it. That’s the only thing I think about – is where do I really want to be and what do I really want to do?
“You have to be that committed to put the right amount into it to do well.”
JRM co-owner Kelley Earnhardt believes if she does well, she will remain in NASCAR.
“There would be greater disappointment in going out there and being very competitive for two years and then her deciding, ‘I know we did good, but I really don’t like it. I like IndyCar better,’” Kelley Earnhardt says.
“That would be very disappointing. … But I think being a driver and having been in race cars, if you are doing well and you’re performing, you’re going to want to keep on going. Look at Mark Martin.”
- She’s with a solid team
JR Motorsports is one of the best Nationwide teams on the circuit. Rick Hendrick is one of the co-owners and the team uses Hendrick engines. It has won eight races in the past two years with drivers Martin, Ron Fellows and Brad Keselowski.
Crew chief, Eury Jr., has been around the sport all his life. He has spent most of it working with Earnhardt Jr., so he knows all about pressure and competing in a spotlight. The competition director is Tony Eury Sr., who won two Busch Series titles as Earnhardt Jr.’s crew chief.
“It’s amazing how much I’m learning from Tony Jr. and Sr.,” Patrick says. “I have a tremendous amount of help. … I have given myself the best opportunity.”
- She’ll have no sponsorship issues
GoDaddy.com obviously loves her, and not just for her talent behind the wheel. It is sponsoring both her IndyCar and NASCAR efforts. It is also backing Mark Martin’s Sprint Cup team at Hendrick, a testament to its commitment to NASCAR.
With GoDaddy on board, Patrick won’t have to worry about sponsorship, as IndyCar star Dario Franchitti did in his brief NASCAR career at Chip Ganassi Racing. Her sponsor won’t be pushing her to win, and will get plenty of exposure regardless of her results on the track.
“Danica is Danica,” GoDaddy.com Chief Executive Officer Bob Parsons says. “I suspect she’s not going to be shy about trading paint and that sort of thing.
“I think it’s going to be larger than we expect, I think we’re going to be pleasantly surprised and I think we’ll be rewarded greatly as her sponsor.”
- She’s not starting in Sprint Cup
Patrick admits this transition won’t be easy, and her plan of 25-26 Nationwide races over the next two years before deciding whether to go Cup racing is different than that of nearly all the other drivers who tried to make the transition.
Sam Hornish Jr., Scott Speed, AJ Allmendinger, Juan Pablo Montoya and Dario Franchitti had a combined 40 NASCAR starts before they began their first full seasons at the Cup level. The most was Speed, who ran 16 races in the Truck Series.
In the Nationwide Series, if a driver finishes on the lead lap, a top-20 finish is likely. It is also a series in which many drivers are considered “developmental” and mistakes are more easily forgiven.
“You can tell she wants to do it the right way,” says driver/owner Tony Stewart, one of the few drivers to thrive in stock cars after having a base in IndyCar. “She understands how hard everybody’s worked to get to this level here and she doesn’t want to be one of those people that just comes in and gets stuff handed to her. … You’ve got to learn before you get here.”
- She has driving talent
Patrick has one victory in 81 IndyCar starts and is the only woman to win an IRL race. While she has only one victory, she does have 16 other top-five finishes. She also was third in the 2009 Indianapolis 500, the highest finish for any woman in the race’s history. She also was the first woman to lead a lap in the race when she led in 2005.
In her NASCAR tests, she’s shown enough speed to impress Eury Sr.
“I wasn’t ready for what I’d seen,” Eury Sr. says.
Before coming to the IRL, Patrick spent two years in the Toyota Atlantic Series, finishing third in the 2004 standings. She moved to Europe in 1998 after a successful karting career and competed in the Formula Ford championships.
While NASCAR fans might have only become interested in Patrick recently, the open-wheel world has been following her for about 10 years, since she started attracting attention in Europe.
“She’s going to have struggles,” Earnhardt Jr. says. “She’ll have adversities. Everyone makes mistakes. She’ll be learning the whole time, and, hopefully, she picks it up pretty fast. She didn’t get to where she was today without being able to progress and understand and learn with each step, and I think she’ll be able to do that in our cars.”
5 reasons why she won’t succeed:
- She doesn’t have the track record
The fact that three-time IRL champ Hornish hasn’t thrived in NASCAR and is entering a make-or-break season shows that winning in a 1,565-pound, high-downforce Indy car doesn’t translate into immediate success in a 3,450-pound, low-downforce stock car.
Franchitti, the 2007 IRL champ, struggled in Sprint Cup in 2008 before returning to the IRL and winning that series’ title last year. Former CART and Formula One driver Montoya needed three seasons before really hitting his stride in Cup.
And Patrick is no Montoya or Hornish. This isn’t like Jeff Gordon suddenly deciding to switch to Indy cars.
“I think she can come here, but I look at Franchitti, I look at Tony when he first came over from open‑wheel to run the Busch car at the time, I look at Juan, and they are incredibly talented individuals,” says former NASCAR driver Kyle Petty. “Juan Montoya is probably, car-control‑wise, one of the most amazing human beings you’ve ever seen in a car, and he struggled for three years at this level before he got really where he could race.
“And she’s not Juan Montoya, sorry. And she’s not Dario Franchitti. She’s not Tony Stewart. She’s not really shown over there and won races and done the stuff over there, numbers‑wise.”
- Her part-time NASCAR schedule
Jack Roush wouldn’t even consider negotiating with Patrick if she insisted on a part-time NASCAR schedule. Montoya advised against it.
If Patrick drives the Nationwide race at Daytona, she’ll do three back-to-back NASCAR race weekends. The next time she would race back-to-back would be in October. She is scheduled to drive in the final six Nationwide events of the 2010 season.
It will be difficult for her to get into a rhythm, and from June to September she will be trying to jump from one car to the other.
“I wouldn’t be driving both cars to be honest,” Montoya says. “I just wouldn’t. I wouldn’t do it because they drive so different. You’re going to get comfortable in one thing and then you’re going to make it to the other thing, and every time it’s going to be like night and day.
“When I drive the 24 hours [sports-car event] and I get to Daytona, it feels really weird and I’ve been driving stock cars for three years now.”
- She won’t be able to handle the schedule and finishing 15th
This season will test Patrick’s mental fortitude like no other.
Last year, Patrick competed in 17 IndyCar races over 28 weeks. This year, she’ll do 31 or 32 races over 42 weeks. She says she’s prepared to handle the schedule. We’ll see.
When top college athletes go to the pros, one of the most difficult transitions is the number of games they play. They often hit a wall before their first season is over.
Patrick has never had this rigorous of a racing schedule.
“I have no doubt I’ll get used to it, and I have more and more over the years gotten used to a more busy schedule,” Patrick says. “I think there will be slightly more consistency and predictability with this schedule because races won’t just pop up. I’m actually looking forward to that.”
She’ll also have to face the prospect of racing as hard as she can some weeks just to finish 20th. That was one of the most difficult things for Montoya to deal with.
“I hope to go out there and win every single race and we’ll see what happens from there,” Patrick says.
- The car
Back in the days of A.J. Foyt and Mario Andretti, it was nothing for an open-wheel driver to jump into a stock car and be competitive. But times have changed.
“Those were different times,” says Chip Ganassi, who owns teams in both disciplines. “What happened is all these formulas have gotten so specialized that the days of jumping back and forth between cars is getting more difficult than it used to be.”
The cars are so technical that small changes can make a big difference. And there is no telemetry in stock cars to help a driver calculate changes. Patrick is going to have to relay what the car is doing, especially in the Nationwide Series, where teams typically only get two or three pit stops during the course of a race.
That means she will have to diagnose problems quickly and provide the proper feedback in practice – while trying to learn the track and the preferred line.
“It took us a full day pretty much for her to be comfortable [at the ARCA test],” Eury Jr. says. “When we get to a Nationwide race, we’ve got three hours.”
The problem for Patrick, as she admitted during her test in December, is that she doesn’t know yet how much the car should move in the corners – how loose is too loose?
After a couple of wall-bangers, she should find out.
- Close-quarters racing
One of things Patrick had trouble with in her ARCA test at Daytona was trying to gauge how close she was to the car in front of her – and how much contact she could have with that car.
She must get used to the physical nature of stock-car racing as well as knowing when to let a car pass and when to challenge.
One of the most difficult transitions for Hornish has been learning to race with his competitors, who for a long time had trouble figuring out what to expect from him on the track. Would he remain in the line he had been running, or change lanes without realizing how close another car was to him? Would he race them hard early in the race, or let them go?
“Going fast and racing are two totally different things,” Petty says. “That’s like being a fastball pitcher and pitching. … There are guys that run Cup right now that are just fast, but they can’t drive.”
Patrick also could be targeted, like most rookies, and could be tested by other drivers to see how much beating and banging she will take.
No matter the outcome, JR Motorsports co-owner Kelley Earnhardt believes the Patrick experiment will be worth it.
“I’m just excited if it can be,” Kelley Earnhardt says. “If it’s not, fine. … I won’t be disappointed because I feel like we had the opportunity to do this, and this is the first opportunity that a female has gotten that is the best opportunity you can get in the equipment, resources and the team.
“That’s satisfaction enough to give that opportunity. I don’t care if she’s 25th every week; she’s still making an impact as a female with 42 other guys out there. That’s still success. That’s still something to write home about.”
