Patrick puts Indy crash behind her
Danica Patrick isn’t apologizing to Ryan Briscoe or anyone else.
Even with nearly a week to cool down since Briscoe hit her car on pit road last Sunday, ending her quest for an Indy 500 victory, Patrick hasn’t changed her tune about the incident or her angry, aborted march toward Briscoe’s pit stall.
“I don’t regret those things,” Patrick said Friday at the Milwaukee Mile in West Allis, Wis., where she and the rest of the IRL IndyCar Series drivers will get back on track over the weekend.
The suburban Milwaukee track is also where Patrick had a brief pit road confrontation with Dan Wheldon a year ago following an on-track incident during the race.
“You know, adrenaline’s pumping,” she said of the post-race blowups. “That usually lasts after every weekend, after every time you’re on the track in a race situation, for an hour or two after. Your adrenaline’s up. You’re thinking about it, talking, sort of debriefing the whole thing. That’s the same pretty much every weekend.”
Her confrontation with Wheldon last year ended with her giving the Chip Ganassi Racing driver a small shove as he walked away. Both laughed it off later, saying there was no bad blood between them.
The brief search for Briscoe at Indy ended well short of Briscoe’s pit stall when a speedway security man suddenly appeared by her side and coaxed Patrick over the pit wall and back to her garage.
“I don’t regret my instincts and emotions, nor can I change them very easily,” she said Friday. “I try to not live with those kinds of regrets. I think everything happens for a reason.”
Patrick and Briscoe talked briefly hours after the 500 and Briscoe said Thursday that neither of them apologized or took blame for the incident.
“I think the one thing we’ve agreed on is, we both want to just move on,” Briscoe told the Associated Press. “And I’m happy we’ve got a race this weekend so we can put that behind us.”
Sprint Cup
Greg Biffle held off the Busch brothers, turning a lap of 155.219 mph on Friday at Dover (Del.) International Speedway to take the top spot for Sunday’s Best Buy 400 and bolstered his bid to drive the No. 16 Ford to his first victory of the season.
Kurt Busch was second at 153.971, and points leader Kyle Busch was third at 153.767 on the 1-mile concrete track.
Jimmie Johnson and Jamie McMurray round out the top five for Sunday’s race.
Perhaps the surprise of the day was Jeremy Mayfield qualifying 10th in the No. 40 Dodge. Mayfield holds the track record of 161.522 set in 2004. He only competed in seven Cup races this season – none since April – and was substituting for the injured Dario Franchitti.
“This is probably the best car I’ve had in two years,” he said. “It amazes me how (the team) have worked with me.”
Craftsman Truck Series
Making the most of his sixth start in NASCAR’s Craftsman Truck Series – and capitalizing on transmission troubles that temporarily sidelined Kyle Busch’s dominant Toyota – former Formula 1 driver Scott Speed ran away from the field after a late restart to win the AAA Insurance 200 at Dover International Speedway.