Patrick’s Victory Not A Surprise

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 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

Friday, April 25th, 2008 Filed under Uncategorized |