Patrick’s debut provides lesson

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Even as her mangled race car belched steam from its radiator in the background, Danica Patrick remained confident she would have good days in NASCAR.

This wasn’t one of them.

Making her NASCAR debut, Patrick ran outside the top 20 for most of Saturday’s Nationwide Series race at Daytona International Speedway before getting caught up in a 12-car wreck just past the race’s halfway point.

Patrick was hoping to learn as much as she could about a new style of racing. She ended up going to the school of hard knocks.

“It’s important to have realistic expectations,” Patrick said. “There’s going to be spikes in performance, I don’t doubt that. But there’s also going to be tough days. And today, I would say, was more of a tough day.”

Tony Stewart went on to win the race for the fifth time in six years.

And it was an expensive day for Dale Earnhardt Jr., who went airborne in a frightening wreck later in the race. He and Patrick both escaped without significant injuries.

Earnhardt is a co-owner of the JR Motorsports team, which now must find the money to repair Patrick’s car and completely replace the one Earnhardt wrecked – a bill that could total $200,000.

But budget concerns aside, Earnhardt praised Patrick’s ability. According to Earnhardt, the fact that she wasn’t running near the front Saturday doesn’t mean she can’t be competitive in NASCAR right away.

“This is such a different kind of racing than she’ll do the rest of the season,” Earnhardt said. “I think that everybody should just take Daytona for what it is.”

Stewart said the experience Patrick gained was more important than the result.

“She got a lot of laps in today, and that’s what needed to happen,” Stewart said. “It would have been a disaster if she had been taken out on the second lap and didn’t get a chance to learn anything.”

Patrick finished sixth in last week’s ARCA event at Daytona, and felt comfortable enough to move her NASCAR debut up a week to the Nationwide opener.