Danica briefly leads at Daytona, finishes 14th
For a few laps, at least, Danica Patrick's day was going better than most people imagined: She was racing for the lead at Daytona International Speedway.
Patrick briefly led Saturday's NASCAR Nationwide race at Daytona, but she couldn't stay there. Still relatively inexperienced in stock car racing, Patrick struggled when it was her turn to be the pushing car in the two-car style of drafting that has dominated Daytona Speedweeks.
Unable to consistently team up with a drafting partner, she faded in the middle of the race and finished 14th - the best finish of the IndyCar series regular's brief Nationwide career.
''I pushed a little bit at the end, a little too late,'' Patrick said. ''But it was really cool when Clint (Bowyer) was pushing me and they told me that I did lead a lap, at least. That was really cool. But that just showed me that that's what you've got to do, and that's what they were doing up front today.''
Dale Earnhardt Jr., whose JR Motorsports team fields cars for Patrick, praised her run. And if Patrick wasn't fully engaged in tandem drafting all day, Earnhardt said it wasn't because she was reluctant to do so.
''I think she was just doing whatever she felt was necessary to get to the end of the race and see if she had a shot at it,'' Earnhardt said. ''I think she did a good job.''
Patrick started fourth and tried to push the car in front of her at the start.
''I tried to push at the very, very beginning on the start, and it didn't really work, like I kept kind of bouncing off of them,'' Patrick said. ''And it kind of actually went down about exactly like I kind of thought it was going to be. The cars went wide and we were in the middle and so I just found a place on the bottom as soon as I could.''
She then spent much of the first stages of the race running in or near the top 10 despite having trouble finding a drafting partner.
The fact that she could run solo with the leaders was an indication that she had one of the fastest cars in the field.
Patrick then missed a major accident, sneaking past the spinning car of Michael Annett.
Then she finally found a drafting partner in Bowyer - and with a push from Bowyer, she rocketed to the lead.
''You look for fast cars,'' Bowyer said. ''I'm telling you, when you're racing in that kind of atmosphere, you got to find a fast race car and meet up with it. I knew she had a fast car, and we'd go to the front.''
But when Bowyer wanted to take a turn in front to get some air to his radiator and cool off his engine - a critical part of the tandem drafting strategy, because the car doing the pushing runs the risk of overheating - Patrick didn't latch onto Bowyer's rear bumper and try to shove him around the track.
Bowyer said he tried to get his spotter to coordinate the switch with Patrick's spotter.
''I was going to push her up to the front, and I did until I got hot and I had to switch,'' Bowyer said. ''I was yelling at my spotter, 'Go find her spotter.' And I guess he (Patrick's spotter) didn't think she needed to be doing that because he wasn't paying attention.''
Bowyer then jokingly told his spotter to go throw her spotter off the roof.
The drafting alliance between Patrick and Bowyer fell apart, and both drivers fell behind.
Patrick eventually did try pushing the car in front of her at the very end of the race.
''At the end there, when it was the most chaotic, I was OK to push,'' Patrick said. ''You can't really see, though, so that's the problem. And it was the worst time to try it, really.''
As she gains experience in NASCAR, Patrick says she'll earn more respect from fellow drivers and have an easier time drafting.
''I'm probably not to the point where if I pull out, people are going to go, 'All right, she's going, I'm going,''' Patrick said. ''So that takes a while to earn the trust and respect from all the other drivers. I'm not mad at that. That's just going to take time. It'll only get better from here on out.''
