Danica Patrick still evolving a decade into her career
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- Danica Patrick eagerly extracted the black plastic card from her wallet, placed it carefully onto the rotating marble table in her motor coach and traced the fine, fine print with her finger.
"It basically says, 'You totally made it. ... Present this card at Chipotle every day for up to a year. Know this isn't valid for life,' " she told USA TODAY Sports, lifting her finger to emphasize the point, meaning she hadn't yet received the same mega free-burritos-for-life golden ticket as notable sports celebrities like Tony Hawk and honorary Daytona 500 starter Abby Wambach. "But it's every day. Or I can do it for up to 100 people for an event twice."
She continued to peruse the details. Her brow furrowed. Her fist slammed against the flecked tabletop as she feigned – or perhaps not – outrage.
"What! Valid through May of '15. Valid. Through. Somebody didn't get this card to me quick enough!" she bellowed before her scowl recessed into a humorous resignation. "Well, anyway."
Free burritos had come with an expiration date. Her career, she insists, does not.
USA TODAY Sports sat down with the 2013 Daytona 500 pole-winner in her motorhome during SpeedWeeks to talk about Patrick's progress and place in NASCAR, which has been debated since she began transitioning to the series from IndyCar as a part-time Xfinity Series driver with JR Motorsports in 2010.
It has become voraciously consumed pre-season grist as she embarks on her third full Sprint Cup season with Stewart-Haas Racing. And with understandable reasons. Management for the 32-year-old racing pioneer and mainstream media powerhouse -- who dates fellow Sprint Cup driver Ricky Stenhouse Jr. -- is in the process of renegotiating new contracts with not only her race team, but primary sponsor GoDaddy, which has underwritten her career since becoming her fulltime sponsor beginning with her 2010 IndyCar campaign with Andretti Autosport.
Still an admitted work in progress as a stock car driver, with 82 starts in the top-level Sprint Cup series and 61 in the second-tier Xfinity, she has exhibited slow growth that teammate and co-owner Tony Stewart said is discernable by the team but often too subtle for layman to notice. Finishing 28th in points in 2014 after placing 27th in 2013 is an obvious source of comparison in a sport predicated on finishing first, however. It appears to some that she is idling.
Patrick's second full Cup season was a statistical puzzler. Her average starts and finishes improved by 7.8 and 2.4 respectively. She led 15 laps after amassing five in her previous two seasons. She reset career bests twice, with a seventh-place finish at Kansas Speedway and a sixth at Atlanta Motor Speedway, especially encouraging because those types of 1.5-mile tracks are the core of the Sprint Cup schedule and most of Patrick's highlight moments had previously occurred on superspeedways, where high banks and high momentum accentuated her experience and driving style. Patrick continued to be proficient at Daytona International Speedway, finishing eighth here last summer. She ran with the leaders late in the Chase for the Sprint Cup race at Talladega Superspeedway.
But a crew chief change toward the end of the season that sent homespun leader Tony Gibson to teammate Kurt Busch and Daniel Knost, in his first Cup season at the position, to the No. 10 Chevrolet, immediately benefited the 2004 champion but seemed to blunt Patrick's momentum.
How quickly Knost and Patrick can mesh and produce on the track remains to be seen and could be a driving force behind how quickly she can go from average mid-pack finishes to something consistently stronger.
Patrick's relationship with her sponsor is another key factor in her NASCAR future. Where once she was a ubiquitous television spokesperson for GoDaddy, an online domain name registrar, she has become a more subtly utilized tool in the company's new focus on small business and the recruitment of females as customers and employees.
Her most visible mainstream splash, what would have been a 14th appearance in a GoDaddy Super Bowl television ad, was this year quashed by protests from animal rights activists. Skepticism has rushed in to fill the void with the dearth of any official announcements over GoDaddy's return and to what extent of sponsorship. Fairly or not, those will continue at greater volume, especially as she embarks on a third season that is often critical in driver-team-sponsor dynamics.
Patrick said her management is negotiating exclusively with SHR, her preferred destination.
"They're happy with everything," Patrick said of her relationship with her sponsor. "The thing with GoDaddy, they were pleased with the [three] top 10s I had last year and the better runs and those things definitely made them happy. And, obviously, the biggest part for them is really the advertising outside of it. That's kind (of) more of what drives their business than anything. Obviously, the Super Bowl commercial made a ruckus but I also think that it made a bigger splash than if it had just been an average commercial that no one really talked about."
SHR competition director Greg Zipadelli said there is "light at the end of the tunnel," in terms of her development as a driver. But he understands outside inquisitiveness over this juncture of her career, even though Patrick and team co-owners Gene Haas and Stewart have professed their desire to renew their partnership.
"I don't want to say industry standard, but I really do think there's something about that," he said. "If not, everybody's looking to improve their programs, right? Whether it be a sponsor looking to associate themselves with someone else. ... The thing she has, is such a huge fan following, it's a long relationship with her sponsor, GoDaddy, and the other things she does. And obviously, being a female in this sport, I think she has done a remarkable job dealing with the stresses and drama of just that. So I think maybe there's exceptions to the rule with her because there's so much more brought to it."
GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving told espnW.com in 2013 that concerning Patrick's on-track performance, "Honestly, it doesn't matter."
Said Patrick: "I think that stuff is going really well."
And it has been, at an often frenetic pace, for nearly a decade.
Ten years ago, Patrick was a 22-year-old IndyCar rookie at Rahal Letterman Racing, a relative unknown outside of the racing community, especially the open wheel community. She became a curiosity first because of her uniqueness and allure, then a fourth-place finish at Motegi, Japan, then her burgeoning performances in the May preliminaries to the Indianapolis 500.
May 15 marks the tenth anniversary of the Indianapolis 500 Pole Day in which she set the fastest lap run by a female at the track, qualified fourth as a rookie in her first Indianapolis 500 and officially became a decidedly big deal.
Two weeks later, she completed a star-making month and became a global phenomenon by leading 19 laps – as late as Lap 193 of 200 – and finishing what was at the time a gender record-fourth. She subsequently was dispatched by the media-starved IRL on a national press junket that eclipsed that of race-winner Dan Wheldon.
"It's seemed fast and it's seemed slow," she said. "I think it seems like it wasn't all that long ago that I was racing at Indy, but so much has happened that it does seem like a long time ago.
"I can't believe I stuck that much into ten years."
Certainly, there are unknowns as she embarks into the second decade of opportunity, wealth and racing that so few enjoy for so long.
Speculation will increase over her contract situations if they creep toward the typical consummation period of late summer, just as it did before she inked her last deal with Andretti Autosport in 2009. A part-time contract to drive in the Xfinity Series with JR Motorsports was announced two months later. Still, Patrick reminded a reporter last week when pressed about negotiations that it was still "friggin' February."
Patrick is personally and professionally pleased with where she is, but has had a decade to consider how plans change, by design or circumstance.
"My life has definitely evolved and changed a lot in 10 years," she said. "I definitely didn't think ten years ago when I raced IndyCar I would be racing NASCAR. But I am. It goes along with a lot of other things in my life that have changed. But they were all things that I want.
"And so when people ask for five- and 10- and 20-year plans, it's like, you can have grand ideas, it's great and that helps propel you and helps you be driven, and gives you a motivation and goal, but you can't be fixated on what those things are because you can never know what life will present you."
And how long it will last. Like free burritos.
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