Confused Business Thinking Marks Patrick's Current Reign As Open-Wheel Diva

"We're definitely exploring all the opportunities that are out there for me as a driver...as a business and (as) a brand." - Danica Patrick

Motorsports Op-Ed By Rick Carlton

Oy vay. The distaff "L'Enfant terrible" has managed to do it again. Just when I was beginning to respect her capabilities as a race driver again Danica goes and throws the baby out with the bath water. A business? A brand? Really? Look, I have no problem with race drivers getting paid well for superlative work, but there is a clear difference between leveraging competitive fire and selling out. Unfortunately, it looks like the latter characteristic is winning out in association with Ms. Patrick's future.

The silly season started last year when an alleged "sighting" at PIR put her with Jack Roush at a NASCAR Nationwide show. Normally, the incident wouldn't warrant more than an eye blink in the racing firmament, but Danica was about to begin the last year of her three-year contract with Andretti-Green, and Michael Andretti was somewhat vague about the racing future of his most obvious team property. When put to the test early in 2009 season he was only willing to suggest that the team wanted to have her back, but there were details that needed working out. Clearly not a forward-leaning response to be sure.

Then Andretti decided that he would handle race strategy for Patrick himself, rather continuing Kyle Moyer's previous pit-stand relationship with her. Was this a tactical move to push the volatile driver to be more competitive, or a pure business consideration that allowed Andretti to gauge her overall team value going forward? One can only guess. However, the results this year seem to lie somewhere between both suggestions. Unfortunately for Patrick, however, Top-5's are not what hard-core car owners want, they want wins. Because race teams don't eat on the basis of brand visibility only.

As the negotiations have continued and the season has begun to wind down, less and less has been heard about Danica's future at AGR. Sure she's been a bit more racy this year, but the wins haven't come, and there's not much an owner can do when one's driver consistently starts slowly, can't pass on the racetrack without weaving around, and spends an inordinate amount of time in mid-pack looking for yellows, or opportunities to move up based only on pit strategy. Clearly something is wrong here.

Then recently Patrick started ramping up the noise about a potential move to NASCAR and things have really gotten stupid. Now lets think about this logically for a minute. To paraphrase Harry Hyde in Days of Thunder "Sprint Cup Cars weigh twice as much, and the tires are half the size." Then, there's an aerodynamic concern since Cup cars produce about 1/10th the downforce when compared with an IndyCar (approx 300 lbs psi versus 3000 lbs psi). Where an IndyCar can literally roll across the ceiling at speed, a Cup car will just sit there on the ground and flop around loudly. These kinds of dynamic limitations do not bode well for a young woman who has never managed to overcome her tendency to drive badly in a twitchy race car.

Finally, there are the characteristics of the drivers in NASCAR. Patrick has never turned a lap in a stock car, let alone running in a pack at Talladega, Atlanta or Daytona. And there are literally hundreds of NASCAR drivers who have never gotten "comfortable" running among 42 other drivers on a Superspeedway. Additionally, guys like the battling Busch brothers, or Truex, or Kenseth, or Biffle, or Edwards, or Montoya might want us to believe that they are real nice guys off the track, but what they really want to do is win all the time, every time. And what they do not need is a chick diva who can't get out of her own way on the race track. As a result, Patrick could easily find herself as the mystery meat in the center of the blender.

Believe it or not, I wish Danica well and she is making progress as a professional racer. But she's got to use her head in this case. What she needs is to turn the NASCAR rhetoric off and tell Andretti that she'll take whatever AGR offers her and be happy about it. Because today's marketing value could be tomorrow's has-been and even though she's only in her mid-20's the career clock is beginning to tick - loudly. Better she should learn at Andretti's feet for a couple more years and try to achieve something worth talking about as a real racer, rather than taking a good money deal, at the wrong time, in the wrong series and end up as the focus of a "remember-when card" on a rack at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway's gift shop.