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Hard to believe, but Danica Patrick is preparing to make her fifth start in the Indianapolis 500.
Of course, Indianapolis Motor Speedway is where “Danicamania” was hatched in 2005, when the then 23-year-old rookie burst into national prominence by leading late in the Memorial Day classic before ultimately claiming a fourth-place finish in what was just her fifth IndyCar Series race.
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IMS has always been a strong track for Danica. After her rookie run, she posted eighth-place finishes at Indy in 2006 and 2007, and was running solidly in the top 10 last year until she got swept into a pit-lane accident by Ryan Briscoe.
“I like it here [at Indianapolis]; I enjoy it,” Patrick said earlier this month. “I embrace the month. I have a lot of fun. What exactly makes me good here, or whatever, is subjective anyway.
“The first year I came here, I took the advice from all the people around me, the people that have been here the most. The advice was to respect the track, to be patient, and I do that. I still ask opinions about what do I need to know about [Indy].”
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Some of the pressure that Patrick is under comes with the territory of being a mainstream media star. She is by far the most popular and most publicized driver in the IndyCar Series, with endorsements from title sponsor Motorola (and its Boost cell phone program), Peak auto care products and Tissot watches.
In general, it appears that Patrick is trying to soften up her image.
“I hope that it’s a little bit more contained and hopefully it doesn’t reach the level that it did last year,” Patrick said of her temper. “I’m learning, and I’m learning how everything I say and everything I do, I just have to imagine that it’s all on camera.”
“Not showing emotions would definitely not be me. I think there is a time and a place for getting excited, but it’s not all the time. My goal this year is just to smile a whole lot more.”
The other pressure on Danica comes from questions about her ability to regularly win races and contend for the series championship. Although she is now a steady top-10 runner, her oval qualifying form has not matched her rookie season when she claimed the three poles. And there are still doubts about her qualifying speed at road and street courses.
“I think that I was surprised probably in the beginning to find out that the ovals were something that came a little bit easier to me than the road courses,” she said. “I was even more surprised that the short ovals were even stronger than anything.”
“I do think the road courses have really been coming along. It’s something that I’ve put tons of emphasis on over the last couple of years. There’s some incredibly good road-course drivers out there in the IndyCar Series and to run with them and to run with the likes of Dario Franchitti and Tony Kanaan is a big accomplishment. Now it’s time to really buckle down and get out there and beat them instead of just run with them. It’s hard, though. These drivers are not making it easy.” ESPN
Patrick said she used to feel like she had to prove to people that she was a serious competitor, that she felt finishing anywhere other than first was unacceptable. The way she tried to prove it was by getting mad. But she found there were drawbacks.
“It just doesn’t really pay off,” she said, “and it turns people off.”
Not everybody, it doesn’t. Hang around Patrick in any situation where she interacts with the public and you’ll hear plenty of fans encourage her to kick some male-driver butt. To take no grief. To stand up for herself.
It’s not just women who do this, either. I remember watching this phenomenon in the garage area before Patrick’s first IRL race, at Homestead-Miami Speedway in March 2005. All we knew about her then was that she had raced in the open-wheel minor leagues, that in vehicles other than go-karts she had just one win — the pro division of the pro-celebrity race that accompanies the Grand Prix of Long Beach, and that she had done some racy magazine photo spreads.
Was she legit or was she just a hyped-up creation of team owner Bobby Rahal? No one knew. Her 15th-place finish in a 22-car field that day (she crashed after 158 laps in an incident that also took out six other drivers, including 2003 series champion Scott Dixon) didn’t provide many answers.
Less than three months later, Patrick became “Danica” (no last name needed) once and for all by stepping up in the IRL’s only mass-appeal race, the Indy 500. She started and finished fourth better than any other woman had ever finished at Indy and she led laps, 19 of them, something else no one of her gender had ever done in the 500.
Yeah, it seemed she could drive a little, so fans settled in and waited for the next logical step for winning a race. That finally happened last year, and the circumstances were both good and bad for the IRL. Good, because the race she won was the one right before the Indy 500 on the schedule. Bad, because it took place in Japan and thus received minimal U.S. media exposure.
Which is why the IRL should be very concerned about this “kinder, gentler” Danica stuff. In their video promo for this season, they show Patrick defiantly declaring that “this isn’t miniature golf” while the camera captures some of her most heated moments. Fox Sports
