Danica Patrick crashed her GoDaddy car Saturday in a 12-car pileup in her first NASCAR race. She was not injured.
Call me uninformed about race car driving – really, you should – but I had no idea she wasn’t racing NASCAR yet. I could blame it on a world and a news media that would rather I focus on her pinup appearances and signature Hot Wheel ™ cars (the Danicar, naturally) than learn that IndyCar is different but it’s really my fault for not knowing enough about car racing.
I have started reading up – on breaks from drawing wild, unfounded conclusions about her jumpsuit.
This woman is totally sponsored by GoDaddy, and she can also snag you a Slurpee ™ and a Big Bite ™ for your next domestic automobile or airplane trip, in your lime green dreams.
Right, Saturday’s wreck (do you see how this gets really complex, really fast? And I’m not even dealing with the pinup stuff. Or my feelings about the Danica section of the GoDaddy Web site or the horrible music that automatically plays when you go to her official site, neither of which I can bring myself to link. The further down the Internet rabbit hole you go, Danicamania – and of course its backlash – gets pretty deep.)
Patrick was, first of all and most importantly, unhurt in the crash that happened on the 69th lap of the Drive4COPD 300 at Daytona International Speedway on Saturday. She was coming off of a first try at stock-car racing the week before that was by all accounts successful, a 6th place finish that helped her earn a spot in this race. Her car, owned by Dale Earnhardt, Jr., had a little trouble early on but she made it through a pit stop only to get hung up in the wreck.
She was lime green philosophical in the aftermath.
“It’s important to have realistic expectations,” she said. “There’s going to be spikes in performance, I don’t doubt that. But there’s also going to be tough days. And today, I would say, was more of a tough day.”
Web chatter calls out Patrick’s unfounded media domination of auto-racing while it thanks her and Junior too for giving a supposedly slumping scene some juice.
And while her image and commercial choices have nothing to do with winning races, she was still the first woman to win an IndyCar race. There’s no telling how things will go with NASCAR.
I may lack tolerance for the flashy stuff but I never discount ambition.
And I also need to figure out if a male driver gets this much flak for wrecking on his first time out in the biggest league, no matter what he’s wearing. Give me time.
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Word. To everything you just said.
Actually, you need to be a bit more involved with the ins and outs of racing to properly answer your question, because things are not as clear cut as to the level of scrutiny.
The switch from Open Wheel to NASCAR is just now becoming a “trend” Before that you have a handful of people here and there, but the names of those that switch (or do both) are almost legendary, including A.J. Foyt, Mario Andretti, Tony Stewart.
But now to answer your question of whether others get similar scrutiny… but not necessarily the same notoriety (or publicity) as Danica. People such as Juan Pablo Montoya, have also made the switch, and have been “disappointing” so far (I put that in quotes, because just how disappointing depends on who you listen to or read), but unlike Danica, you need to really be a race fan to know his name well.
Many people like to harp on Danica for all the other marketing that is done for and around her, but to be honest, I do not have a problem with it. She is still trying to compete in a sport dominated by “good ol’ boys” and racing is expensive, and you need sponsors. If you look back, at some other great female drivers, what you see is that they did not (or do not) race near as often as they could/should have. Janet Guthrie, Lyn St. James and Sarah Fisher all have far fewer races than many men far below their talents, because they could not market themselves well enough to get the sponsors they needed to race.
Danica has turned herself into a brand. With that, she has given herself up to additonal spotlight and scrutiny, but at the same time, it keeps her in a race car, and regardless of how much people may hate her Lime Green Jumpsuit, or doing Go Daddy commercials, it will allow her to do what she wants to do, and that is get her a sponsor that will allow her to race, because only the only way to win a race, is to actually be able to be in the race.