DANICA TAKES CARE OF BUSINESS
Patrick’s new deal proves her value to NASCAR
Motegi, Japan, in 2008? Well, that was on the other side of the planet on a Monday — or was it still Sunday? — and you either heard or vaguely remember that the IndyCar win had something to do with fuel strategy.
The Daytona 500 pole in 2013? Stewart-Haas Racing, Hendrick Motorsports engines and crew chief Tony Gibson. All car, you thought.
Finishing eighth in that 2013 NASCAR season opener, her first start in the Daytona 500 as a fulltime Sprint Cup driver? She was third on the final restart and nobody would work with her when it mattered, you countered.
Danica Patrick showed you something Tuesday, though, with the announcement of a new primary sponsor, Nature’s Bakery, and a contract extension with SHR.
Her seven seasons and 115 starts in the Verizon IndyCar Series and 105 races in parts of four seasons at NASCAR’s highest level have been scrutinized as much for top-fives, top-10s and points position as Q Scores. People have debated the perceived taste of the advertising campaigns that leveraged her allure and discussed whether she deserved the lucrative sponsorships that kept her racing for strong teams at the highest level of motor sports.
Sometimes it was sexism, sometimes reverse elitism, but, so the doubters would put forth, all of this would fix itself when the money went away if the performance wasn’t there. The marketing, so the absurd theory went, shouldn’t surpass the performance, although it does for scores of other drivers.
The first crack in the Patrick polar ice shelf had supposedly occurred when GoDaddy, her benefactor since 2007, first told USA TODAY Sports in April that it would not return as the full-time sponsor of the No. 10 Chevrolet next season. Patrick was in the third and final year of her first Cup contract with SHR and without a full-time sponsor for 2016, muting the hopefulness of her first campaign with rookie crew chief Daniel Knost.
Trouble might not have been looming, but there was unease. The customary transition from one season to the next and the luxury of not worrying about the ensuing deal or sponsor commitment had been lost, she admitted.
Not after Tuesday. And that says a lot about her future.
Team co-owner Tony Stewart wouldn’t divulge terms of the extension other than to describe it as “not a short-term deal by any means” and greater than two years. And in announcing a sponsor new to NASCAR with Nature’s Bakery underwriting her race car for 28 of 36 points events next season, Patrick might have produced one of her biggest accomplishments yet, another that can’t be measured statistically.
In an economic climate that hasn’t returned from the malaise of the downturn that began in the late 2000s, in a series that still consumes, by many estimates, about $16 million to $18 million to produce one competitive Sprint Cup car, Patrick’s presence enticed a company from outside the NASCAR sponsor community to spend a great deal of money in the hope she could do for it what she did in expanding GoDaddy’s national profile.
Certainly, SHR’s management team had much to do with this. But it had to have something to sell, and Patrick, 33, still matters. In a time when some of the sport’s luminaries — including NASCAR most popular driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Stewart — have had to cobble together sponsorship packages, that’s impressive.
Despite having no wins and six career top-10s in NASCAR’s premier series — but being on pace for a career-best 21st-place points finish — Patrick still had something to offer.
Three seasons and one contract in, the novelty was gone and the window for an early splash had passed. And now it was down to the long and decidedly unglamorous work of winning at a high level that faces any competitor.
Was anyone going to pay for that? Yes, and it matters zero whether she has counterparts with better statistics and less financial stability for the future.
Team co-owners Gene Haas and Stewart asserted all along they wanted Patrick back to a team that boasted five Cup championships among Stewart (three), Kurt Busch and defending victor Kevin Harvick. And Stewart again declared Tuesday that Patrick added something tangible — “more from the racing side than the marketing side,” he said — something prospective, to the equation.
Tuesday’s announcement didn’t have the electric-green sizzle of anything GoDaddy ever did. But this was tremendously important at a vital juncture of her career. And it will ensure she will stay on a racetrack for some time to come.
It’s hard to begrudge that.