Speedway — When Dan Wheldon won the 2005 Indianapolis 500, he wasn’t pleased that his winning thunder was stolen by then-rookie Danica Patrick.
One on hand, it was easy to empathize with him, but on the other, Patrick’s inspiring run to the front of the field, leading as late as seven laps to go, was the biggest thing to hit the Indianapolis 500 in several years at the time. Patrick’s near-miss was significant in too many ways not to be the story of the 2005 race.
Ever since then, Patrick has been a magnet of Indy attention, even more so this year after her historic win at Motegi in April.
So it’s no surprise that the indelible image of the 2008 Indianapolis 500 will once again feature Patrick. For all of the wrong reasons.
Patrick stormed through several pit boxes to try and give Penske driver Ryan Briscoe what for after Briscoe got loose coming out of his pit box and hit Patrick in the pit lane on lap 171. Unlike 2005, when Patrick’s positive accomplishments overshadowed a race winner, her petulant march down the Indy pit lane does not deserve to overshadow Scott Dixon’s solid victory. But it will.
Don’t believe me? As of writing this column, just an hour after the race ended, Yahoo had Patrick’s tantrum as the main story on its web site. Not the main sports story, its main story overall. Dixon was an afterthought.
It stinks.
I’m not saying Patrick doesn’t have a right to be upset; who wouldn’t be, after getting taken out of the Indianapolis 500? But her over-the-top reaction is way out of line with Briscoe’s crime.
The accident was Briscoe’s fault, but his mistake ranks low on the all-time list of stupid driver mistakes. Briscoe isn’t the first driver to gun it too much coming out of the pits and isn’t the first to lose his rear end doing so. He probably wasn’t the only driver in that pit sequence to do it. Unfortunately, his exuberance took Patrick out.
It was a racing accident, nothing that hasn’t happened before or will again, and it should have been treated as such by Patrick. Instead, her angry tantrum played out before the entire world.
What a shame.
Patrick’s temper is noted, but it wasn’t as if her march down the pit lane was an immediate reaction. Her car came to a rest at the end of pit lane for several minutes, before it was pushed back to her pit near the entrance of Gasoline Alley. It took some time for her crew to realize the rear suspension was damaged beyond repair before Patrick was even out of her car. Heat of the moment it wasn’t.
Anger trumped reason when Patrick’s personal crusade against Briscoe compelled her to walk through several active pit boxes on her jaunt to the Penske boxes. It dripped with irony, given that Patrick hit a crew member from Dale Coyne’s team in her pit box during the last race weekend at Kansas Speedway.
Patrick was rightfully exonerated in most racing circles for that, given that the crew member she struck should never have been in the pit box. No one who isn’t a crew member should ever be in an active pit box, green flag conditions or not, it’s very dangerous. For proof, watch Alex Lloyd’s crash on lap 151 when his car frightfully careened through the pit lane.
She deserves a fine for that alone.
But just as bad was the petulance. She gave off the air that she couldn’t handle the kind of adversity that afflicts every driver in every series from every era. Some like that “give ‘em hell” attitude; I think it’s childish and not becoming a driver of Patrick’s talents.
She should take a page from her teammate. When Tony Kanaan was taken out by an ambitious Marco Andretti move midway through the race, there was one calmly delivered critical comment from Kanaan, and he (publicly) let it go.
When Patrick acts as she did, it gives off the impression that she’s above reproach. She isn’t.
The defining moment in Tomas Enge’s Indy career is being taken out by Patrick when she spun during a yellow flag in 2005. That was a much more blatant mistake than Briscoe’s was, but I don’t recall similar histrionics from Enge. Patrick also took out four cars at Iowa Speedway a year ago in an overambitious restart, and while there was some hue-and-cry, none of the drivers had a public tantrum on the scale of Patrick’s.
The point of dredging up history is not to slam Patrick’s skills, which are considerable, but to point out that every driver has made mistakes, from A.J. Foyt on down the line. Whether the victim or the perpetrator, act like you’ve been there before, because chances are, you’ll be there again.
And I see the giant gorilla in the room of this column. To criticize Patrick is to be sexist. I disagree.
Criticizing Patrick merely for being a female driver is sexist. Using her gender as the first club out of your bag to criticize her ability is sexist.
Criticizing Patrick for acting immature is not.
Women deserve, and better have, equality when their talent rises to the top as Patrick’s has. But equality doesn’t mean heaping praise on Patrick when she deserves it and muting yourself when she deserves criticism. That is, in itself, denigrating to female drivers who deserve to be treated like any other driver.
There is no doubt in my mind that Patrick is the best closed-circuit female driver ever. For all of the grousing from non-Patrick fans about attention she gets from the media, much of it is deserved based on merit, not hype. She’ll be a star for years to come.
She needs to act like it and not fly into rage when the racing gods don’t smile on her.
Todd Golden is sports editor of the Tribune-Star. He can be reached at (812) 235-5450 or todd.golden@tribstar.com.
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