Danica Patrick

We would never promise to tell you where Danica will be at any given time. But here’s a head’s up on the next three days — she’ll be all over New York City (hence being broadcast and cablecast to most of the known American universe) promoting her new book. As the site of the unauthorized biography on Danica we are perplexed. There’s value in a person’s own story and there’s value to the “as seen through the eyes of another” approach. The former has more intimate details, quite obviously, and the latter has, well, fewer inhibitions about telling the truth as it is best understood. (The truth is, for instance, the author, whom I happen to know intimately, is green with envy that Danica will be the toast of a great and exciting town for the next three days.) In service to this pressing question of which approach has more value (touring New York clearly wins versus staying at home to blog) we would like to present the following Top Ten. Feel free to forward it to Danica’s team co-owner, David Letterman, or the bald guy to his right who leads the band but is no relation to our author — or the other team owner — despite appearances. TOP TEN TRUTHS ABOUT DANICA LEARNED EN ROUTE TO WRITING HER UNAUTHORIZED BIOGRAPHY

10. Adolesence in England was a mixed bag, not necessarily an onerous existence for a teenage girl. Danica initially lived at the home of friends of the well-heeled Mecom family of Texas, which along with Ford and her own family helped fund her Formula Vauxhall and Formula Ford years. There was dating, albeit European style, which meant socializing in groups.

9. Extra! Extra! There was at least one rumored young love affair with a driver currently quite successful in sports car endurance racing.

8. There are a thousand and one stories about how Bobby Rahal first got interested in Danica and her driving. Most of them have a self-serving angle of one type or another. We stand by the story from seven-time Indy 500 competitor Lyn St. James. While in England for the Goodwood Festival, St. James talked with Rahal and found out he had not yet seen Danica drive and encouraged him to do so. As Jaguar’s F-1 racing director Bobby was obviously aware of what was happening in Formula Ford given that it was the best source of up-and-coming talent such as Britain’s Anthony Davidson and Australian James Courtney. He may have already had plans to check out the young American driver, but certainly got encouragement from St. James.

7. Extra! Extra! We are honestly unclear which came first: the Argent Mortgage sponsorship of Rahal’s team or the affair between the team owner and an attractive female marketing executive at Argent. In fairness to all, the sponsorship has worked out great!

6. Back to the track. Danica is perhaps more reminiscent of drivers like A.J. Foyt and Dale Earnhardt than 90 out of 100 professionals currently working behind the wheel. How so? When Danica gets hacked off, she can channel the anger into heightened awareness that makes her a better driver. And, even when she causes the problem, e.g. the accident under caution at Indy last year, she gets hacked off and steps up her game instead of agonizing over her own mistake. Trust us, this is a rare and extremely valuable commodity in big league racing, despite all the egos on parade. And, it’s not just ego when you pass Dan Wheldon in Turn One at Indy for the lead with 11 laps to go.

5. Road racing is a very iffy career (i.e. F-1) as is NASCAR for Danica due to her build. She’s not much shorter than Mario Andretti or that much smaller than Dave Marcis. But Danica has narrow shoulders and relatively short arms. No matter how much training and driving she does, the leverage needed through body architecture and muscle mass may be a problem if she hopes to win on road circuits due to heavier steering versus high-speed ovals. Danica, who is already very strong and in peak condition, was a great road racer in karting and finished second in the 2000 Formula Ford Festival. So the driving part is not really the issue. We’ll see how things develop on road courses this year in the IRL (the real ones, not street circuits.)

4. Extra! Extra! The Israeli Air Force prefers women pilots because they handle g-forces better than men according to extensive testing results. High-speed oval racing such as in the IRL generates a lot of g-force, needless to say.

3. The Indy Racing League may indeed have been irrelevant before Danica Mania. If the series is built around the Indy 500, and if the Indy 500 faltered as the place where American heroes were created, then the IRL was indeed irrelevant until Danica restored the metaphoric lifeblood to the Brickyard’s tradition in May.

2. Nothing will motivate Danica this year at Indy like the phrase, “the woman who finished fourth at Indy last year.” Being celebrated for not winning is a slap to her ironclad driver’s ego — and highly motivating.

1. Danica declared as a young girl to many people she met during her early days in karting, “I’m going to win the Indy 500!” We wonder if this will make her biography — if only because it’s a little unbelievable and a little too precious, but true… .

BLOGSNORT He’s got a lot of facts out of kilter, but some of the fundamentals are in place when Robert Weintraub dances on the head of the IRL for having made the 500 irrelevant. These CART fans never seem to point out, however, that Nigel Mania from the pre-IRL days didn’t equal Danica Mania. Also, if CART teams were still running things at Indy, Danica would have never gotten a shot at a front-line ride. And finally, these same CART team owners ran off Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart, so who was really at fault that Indy fell out of favor as a result of NASCAR’s rise? Danica loves it when people make excuses for her . It’s a typical driver’s ego thing. (See Roush Racing and Kurt Busch; they broke up when Jack decided to stop making excuses for Kurt, the final kiss of death.) Ford executives probably picked up on this aspect of Danica. Hence the quotes in Dan Carney’s excellent piece on the early years in Formula Ford. There was still a chance to keep Danica in the Ford family at the time. (Oops, there goes another one. See Jeff Gordon and Kasey Kahne… .) We promised not to locate Danica’s whereabouts daily. Leave it to the IRL to do that.

TODAY’S TRIVIA QUIZ Danica finished second in the Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch in 2000. Who finished first?

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Having written the first comprehensive book on how Danica Patrick vaulted from karting to the front of the field at the Indy 500, I would pose the following questions about a driver who is very talented and brave as she heads into the month of May at the Brickyard.

Will it be the same story with lead driver Buddy Rice healthy instead of sidelined by injury? My answer: If Rice, the Indy 500 winner in 2004, runs well all month at Indy, Patrick will have more information on the sometimes desultory and difficult Panoz chassis (which was likely the root cause of Rice’s practice crash last year. A Panoz has yet to win a race this year).

Is Patrick likely to win the race? Patrick will win at Indy, I believe, but will it be this year? Let’s face it. She had so much good fortune last year en route to starting fourth, leading the race and finishing fourth despite a problem in the pits and her spin during a yellow flag period. She and the veteran Rahal-Letterman team came close to winning and made the most of its opportunities by poise under pressure, determination and the driver’s skill. Also, the team had Honda engines in a year the company had a 15 horsepower advantage over Toyota and teams like Penske Racing and Chip Ganassi Racing.

In a year when all teams have Honda engines, it’s unlikely any driver or team can continue to escape bad luck so agilely — always part of the formula in a race of this magnitude — as the Rahal Letterman team did in 2005. The team would need three straight good years in a demanding race (including Rice’s victory in the rain-shortened event in 2004) to be in contention to win it again this year. Remember as well: last year’s Indy 500 runner-up Vitor Meira, a reliable source of driving talent and chassis information, is gone from Rahal Letterman on the account of sponsorship problems and a fresh rookie has taken over the ride of the fatally injured Paul Dana.

Having made this fearless prediction, it also bears pointing out that Penske Racing won the Indy 500 under a similar IRL format three straight years with two different drivers.

Who will win at Indy? Somebody powered by Honda..

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I wrote the book on Danica Patrick, the one that describes how a girl could go from karting to almost winning the Indy 500 as a young woman. The fact she won a race at Twin Ring Motegi doesn’t surprise me, because she’s such a tough nut — her recent appearance in the Sports Illustrated swim suit issue aside.

Danica and I began speaking to one another only after my unauthorized book (America’s Hottest Racer) was complete. Up until then, she was working on her own book through a New York publishing firm and declined to talk for the record not long after I received one of her very firm handshakes for the first time.

For my biography of Patrick, I used the age-old method of talking with those who knew Danica in her earlier days of karting such as her racing mentor Lyn St. James, her peers while she was running Formula Fords in England, and those who knew her in the days of the Atlantic series. Also, from the time she entered the Atlantics, there was a post-race media conference after every race with quotes that could be found in the series’ web archives. Her Rahal Letterman team, meanwhile, posted a press release on various racing websites before every race.

Needless to say, once she entered the Indy Racing League, getting comments from Danica through the usual sources was no problem, i.e. media conferences at the track, television interviews and media releases from her team.

What evolved from this research was the story of one very determined, brave and talented race car driver. This was no surprise. I was inspired to write the book not only by an advance check from MBI Publishing, but more importantly by her four qualifying laps at Indy in 2005, which I had watched from my home office on ESPN. Patrick came as close to crashing in Turn 1 without crashing as anyone I’d ever seen. She never backed down despite the harrowing moment and posted the fastest lap of the day by time she had finished her run.

I would venture to say that nobody who saw here at the Speedway that day or in her near miss rookie appearance at the Indy 500 was surprised by the fact she won in Japan. The only real revelation is that it required 50 races.

Those who suggest Danica was lucky at Indy in 2005 or in Japan are the types who enjoy putting down a driver they don’t like, which is often enough part of being a fan. Most who don’t like Patrick in particular, it seems to me, are trying to satisfy some emotional need or another when it comes to women who race cars. It’s bad enough, goes this point of view, that in an era when women are fighting wars and running for president that a guy can’t continue to find refuge in a sport where admirable attributes usually ascribed to masculinity are so highly prized.

This is old news, of course. It’s ground that St. James, Janet Guthrie or Shirley Muldowney have previously covered in stories and books of their equally extraordinary racing careers.

None of these women would have gone as far as they did without inspiring somebody with their potential to win races. Every driver has some marketable qualities that they try to exploit while breaking into the sport. But the stop watch, as the saying goes, never lies.

Of the things I learned about Patrick beyond her quickness and commitment, two stand out. First, as St. James pointed out, she had a normal family life compared to other teenage female phenoms active in sports such as tennis, gymnastics or ice skating. In other words, her parents may have been dedicated to having her in competitive karting equipment on race weekends while she was winning races and national championshps, but otherwise life was standard upper Midwest issue.

The family’s support and having the chance to be a typical kid has helped give Patrick the kind of ballast she has needed throughout the ordeal of the constant question of “When are you going to win a race?” The subrosa question being: when are you going to pay for all this sponsorship, first-class equipment and team support that have been given to you? In general, she withstood the demands of fame and stardom, plus the brickbats that it wasn’t deserved, because she knew who she was and that racing may have been a calling and a passion, but not the meaning of life.

The other attribute that stands out, one Patrick shares with all successful women racers, was a love of beating the boys.

The saw of antagonism between the sexes goes the other way, too. In other words, Patrick fed on beating the boys as a young girl and hated losing to them. This was also typical when it comes to young people finding their identities in social settings as they grow up. She adapted to the fact she couldn’t beat the boys regularly as she went up the racing ladder and it’s apparent she’s now made a few allies among her fellow racers, too.

But Patrick never has felt apologetic or intimidated — quite the opposite — about beating the boys. (She once ran over Sam Hornish Jr. in a karting race, in part because he was winning. She nearly ran over the president of the World Karting Association, as well, after being disqualified from a race on a technicality.) The love of beating the boys is a singular quality all successful women racers share. Without naming names, in the past and the present women drivers who might otherwise be winners often falter on this point. The telltale: they opt for traditional female roles of wife or girlfriend in the paddock.

As for crying after her victory due to the relief from the constant pressure (see Jack Arute of ESPN immediately ask the irrelevant question of when she was going to win another race), Patrick is the second driver I’ve reported on who cried after an inaugural superspeedway victory.

When Jeff Gordon won a Busch Series event in Atlanta for Bill Davis Racing in the spring of 1992, he cried in his helmet on the cool down lap — and then talked about it in the post-race interview. Gordon also brought his mother to the post-race winner’s interview, the first driver I’d ever seen do that in rough-and-tumble NASCAR.

So everybody celebrates that first one differently. I suspect we’ll get a chance in the not-too-distant future to see how Patrick handles her second victory.

Jonathan Ingram can be reached at jonathan@jingrambooks.com

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