Danica on Pole

Racing’s posterboy…um, poster-woman…is top of the charts this week!

Danica Patrick qualified on the pole for the Daytona 500 (196.434 mph). She is the first woman to ever sit on pole in a NASCAR event.

Danica is making headlines for her on-track performance. This comes as a relief to many, and yet as a further irritant to others, whether they be fans or racers or have no care for the sport whatsoever.

Danica Patrick has 115 career starts in the IndyCar Series. In that time, she sat on pole three times and won one race in Motegi, Japan. She is the only woman to ever win a race in the IndyCar Series and also the only woman to ever lead the Indianapolis 500 (which she did in two different years). She has competed in ten NASCAR Sprint Cup races, never finishing in the top ten.  She has not been a dominant force on the race track by any stretch of the imagination.

Yet she has appeared in twelve Super Bowl commercials. Even with no wins and extremely limited experience in the series, she is the first person mentioned whenever NASCAR comes up. The media hype only intensified over the last month as news broke that she is dating NASCAR competitor Ricky Stenhouse, Jr. The attention on a driver with only one career victory in major motorsports was very troubling.

Then she shows up and runs the fastest practice time of the day on Saturday. The following day, she puts her #10 Go Daddy machine on the pole.

Was it a fluke? Absolutely not. She was fastest all weekend and certainly knows how to make a machine go fast, especially on the big ovals (her biggest success was always Indy 500 qualifying).

Is it meaningful? That’s to be debated…Obviously, to be the fastest out of 40+ drivers and to win pole at Daytona is a huge accomplishment. Even more so, when all of the teams out there essentially use the same equipment, it can come down to driver ability to get that last tenth of a second on the track. Even if qualifying is 95% crew ability and 5% driver ability (which I don’t debate at all), the driver ability is still there to take the car to the final level. No doubt in my mind, it was the talent of Danica Patrick (with the help of Stewart-Haas Racing) that put her on the pole.

Now, is it meaningful for the race this Sunday? Doubtful. In a NASCAR race, especially a restrictor-plate race, the winner coming from 43rd is just about as likely as the winner coming from pole. Anybody can win. That last lap crash that we expect and love (well, NASCAR fans love, I find it stupid) can lead to somebody starting the last lap in 20th and finishing in 1st. Anything is possible. If you survive until the final lap, you can win the race.

Starting in first place means you’re further away from probability of being collected in the “big one” of a restrictor-plate track. Danica has a much better chance of avoiding a crash because of her qualifying efforts. Further, all evidence so far points to the new car being a little more aerodynamic in 2013. We saw little to no “two car” drafting patterns going around Daytona in the pre-season races over the weekend. Cars with damage fell behind instead of being able to stay with the pack as in prior years, and the field actually was able to spread out a bit based on car and driver ability.

Believe it or not, the fastest car in this year’s Daytona 500 actually has a chance to win the race this year! For the first time in nearly a decade, getting pole at Daytona actually gives you a legitimate advantage in the race itself.

So why is it that over 30% of voters say that she will finish outside of the top 20 and less than 20% say she will finish in the top 5? There are two possibilities: 1). Those voters hate Danica Patrick or think she is talentless because she came from the IndyCar Series, or 2). Because it is a restrictor plate race there is no difference between 1st and 30th and she will be swallowed up and could get caught in a crash.

1). Hate her all you want, but she is a phenomenal driver. She won the pole in less than 3% of her races in IndyCar, and now has been on pole in 10% of her Sprint Cup races. Her first full season in the series and she puts the car on pole? And you think the IndyCar Series is full of scrub drivers, huh?

2). Like I said earlier, I believe you will see the field spreading out more than usual this year with the new car. The pack racing and two-car drafting will be all but extinct.

No matter which of these reasons NASCAR fans give for Danica finishing outside the top 20, one thing is clear: these NASCAR fans are uneducated about the sport they claim to love.