Richard Petty on Danica Patrick: 'She ain't gotten no better or no worse'
Year 5 of Danica Patrick's great foray into NASCAR's Sprint Cup series kicked off at the Daytona 500 and ended same as her previous 118 races: without much of anything to show for it. Following a crash and 35th-place finish Sunday, Patrick now has more than twice as many wrecks (14) in her career as top-10 finishes (six). Not once has she seen a checkered flag from a top-5 position.
None of this is lost on Richard Petty, the greatest racer the sport has known, a seven-time Daytona 500 champion nicknamed The King with good reason. One of royalty's perks, of course, is the ability to reveal one's innermost thoughts without fear of repercussion. And once again Sunday, Petty – one of Patrick's most vocal critics in years past – leveled a harsh assessment of her seeming stagnation as nothing more than a middle-of-the-pack racer.
"She just settled in where she at," Petty told Yahoo Sports. "She ain't gotten no better or no worse."
When asked what she needed to do to win a race, Petty said: "No comment." Which might as well have been him saying: She can't. He has said as much in the past, fending off accusations that he's nothing more than a sexist 78-year-old troglodyte by pointing to her record on the track. And it's damning
Over the last two seasons, when she has run full 36-race slates, Patrick has an average starting position of 22nd and finish of 23rd, according to Racing Reference. Her single greatest accomplishment came when she won the pole of the 2013 Daytona 500, a race in which she lost the lead by the end of the first lap and finished in eighth place. She wrecked here in 2014, finished 21st last year and on Sunday slid through traffic on Lap 184. It took the closest finish in 500 history to redeem a race in which Patrick, wunderkind polesitter Chase Elliott and Dale Earnhardt Jr., the sport's most popular driver, didn't finish.
On Lap 157, Patrick was penalized when a crewmember jumped over the pit-road wall too early. The infraction – a call Patrick deemed close and questionable – set her back a lap and prompted the urgency on which she blamed the crash.
"It put us in a position to be aggressive at the wrong time of the race with cars you don't always want to be aggressive with at the back of the field," Patrick said. "It's just an unfortunate series of events that happened at the end, but I think before that we were having a fairly strong race. I feel like we definitely didn't have the fastest car, but we were able to make good decisions and put ourselves in the right line at the right time and make the most of our situation."
This is the story of Patrick's career: great car and middling racing, mediocre car and great racing, never shall the twain meet. Or at least they haven't, and NASCAR isn't a sport in which late bloomers often emerge. Patrick is now 33, onto a new sponsor after "a half-ass break-up" with her longtime benefactor, GoDaddy, which gave her a platform to build her brand while gaining relevance through the novelty of a female racecar driver.
Which isn't to call Patrick herself a novelty. She drove those 184 laps on Sunday at nearly 200 mph with inches separating her car from others hurtling at the same speed. She competed in IndyCar, won a race and finished third in the Indy 500. She has more fortitude than you, me and every jabroni whose inclination is to criticize her for the temerity of being born with an X chromosome and having her first name end in "ica" instead of being simply "Dan."
Here's the thing: Dan Patrick would be just another mid-tier driver, anonymous to the world, whereas Danica Patrick continues to bring in the sort of fan who stands across from her garage with dreadlocks, Jordan 4s and a vape pen from which he tugged hits every couple of minutes. He wore a No. 10 shirt with the colors of her new sponsor, as did dozens of others who cheered for her after she exited her car and walked from the garage to her trailer.
"It could've just as easily have been running up front and having an accident and saying, 'That's Daytona,' " Patrick said. "Ours just came a little early."
It came in the same fashion as her previous four 500s, as her whole Sprint Cup career, the results disproportionate to the attention paid. Greatness is the only salve for that, and Patrick wants it more than anything, not just because it would silence the Richard Pettys of the world but validate this whole experiment.
Instead, as she walked away from the track Sunday, a roar emanated from the crowd. Denny Hamlin's daring run from fourth for first on the final lap sent the 100,000-person-plus grandstand into a collective conniption. From her spot on the infield, Patrick peered through aviators to sneak a peek at what was causing the commotion. She saw the tops of the cars zoom by, turned around and continued toward the exit, toward the next city, toward a race that perhaps someday she'll finish with all those cars in her rearview.
