iNSIDE SCOOP: One Shining Moment

Danica Patrick has been a full-time NASCAR Sprint Cup Series driver for a season plus 11 races. She’s won a pole at Daytona, led laps there and finished eighth. She’s run in the top 10 at Martinsville.

She hasn’t won, but the performance arc is about right for a driver who started going fast without fenders. Look how long it took Juan Pablo Montoya to figure it out (except on road courses).

However, cynical brutes that we may be, we expected her to be better than it was right for us to expect, if you follow. It takes a while to learn to do this like drivers who were born to it, and it’s tougher when you’re female, especially in NASCAR.

On Saturday night, though, Patrick wasn’t just Danica. She was Driver #10, and she was on the gas.

She qualified well and when the race began she started moving forward. She kept doing that, too, all night long. Perhaps the capper was late in the race, when she passed team boss Tony Stewart and Jimmie Johnson…in the same corner.

That’s nine series titles right there, and a ton of respect.

It’s not that Patrick doesn’t hear the abuse heaped on her by fans skeptical of her viability as a full-blown NASCAR driver. She just channels it, at least what she doesn’t outright ignore.

“I’ve always believed in myself,” she said. “I’ve always believed that in the right situation, that I can do it. And it’s with all respect that these little moments like when you drive by Jimmie Johnson on the outside, stuff like that, that makes me really proud of myself and little moments like that that give me a little bit more confidence.”

She rolled past Six-Time in a restart, on the outside, and went on to finish seventh. Johnson wound up 10^th. She said that was the most rewarding moment of a night full of them.

“I say that with all the respect in the world,” Patrick said. “It’s a big deal because he is Jimmie Johnson.  Aside from that I was really just overall proud that we stayed up front all day.  That was the biggest thing.  When the race started it was about finishing the weekend off right and just staying up there.  You know you are going to go up, you are going to go down a little bit and we sure enough did that, but we more than held our own through the whole race.

“I’m extremely proud of this crew for building a new car that was just awesome.  It was so good on restarts and long runs and tires getting old.  Hard work pays off and they definitely put the hard work into it.  Obviously really happy for days like today to give back to GoDaddy who has always been behind me and get on TV a little bit.”

Twitter was behind her too, as she made her run. It was a swelling of support for the driver that had polarized the fan base for a variety of reasons. It’s not her fault; she’s a female driver in what has been almost exclusively a male-dominated sport.

On Saturday night, though, she was Driver #10, and that will suffice for now.