St. James lauds Patrick’s racing impact

INDIANAPOLIS – The magnitude of Danica Patrick’s potential impact on racing was clear when she exploded onto the IndyCar circuit in her 2005 rookie season, and much of it stemmed from her historic Indianapolis 500 performance in the fifth race of the year.

The first female driver to lead laps at Indianapolis Motor Speedway’s iconic event, the then-23-year-old was leading with less than 10 laps remaining but was low on fuel when winner Dan Wheldon passed her with seven to go.

Patrick finished fourth. That was the highest for a woman in the Indy 500 at that point and the first of many trailblazing accomplishments through her seven IndyCar seasons, followed by six in NASCAR. Now 36, she’ll end her career with Sunday’s Indy 500 driving the No. 13 GoDaddy Chevrolet.

“She set the world on fire,” retired driver Lyn St. James said last week of Patrick’s 19 leading laps that year. “She disproved the naysayers, and she brought all of us to our feet.”

St. James competed in seven Indy 500s between 1992 and 2000. She was the first female Indy 500 Rookie of the Year after finishing 11th, and Patrick became the second.

“She really opened everybody’s eyes,” seven-time Indy 500 driver Lyn St. James recently told USA TODAY.

“If you didn’t believe, her performance will slap you in the face. It’d be like, ‘ What the hell?’ You’d have to be blind not to see what just happened.”

But this isn’t how or when Patrick envisioned her 14-year career ending, and she certainly never imagined doing the Indy 500 again.

Switching to solely focus on NASCAR in 2012 after seven years in IndyCar, she raced stock cars for six full-time seasons — eight total — when it all came to an end in 2017. At the Cup series finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway in November, Patrick burst into tears seconds after sitting down for her news conference, explaining it was her last full-time season in the sport.

Her announcement followed sponsorship and contractual issues that began early last season, and in September, she confirmed she was not returning to Stewart-Haas Racing, the Cup team she had been with since 2013.

But her tearful news offered a bittersweet ending. In what has since been dubbed the Danica Double, her final NASCAR race was the 2018 Daytona

500, and she’s ending her career at the Brickyard.

“I don’t feel like I was necessarily pushed into this,” Patrick said at Homestead in November. “I feel like I should be doing this. I feel like this is where my life should be headed, and sometimes we just get kind of nudged there.”

Early in 2018, she reunited with longtime partner GoDaddy, which previously sponsored her in IndyCar and NASCAR, and drove the No. 7 Chevrolet in the Daytona 500. To the heartbreak of her fans, she was collected by a multiple-car wreck and didn’t finish.

But she has one more shot to end her

14-year career on a high note, and it’s at a track where she’s had lots of success.

“I never thought I would do (the Indy

500 again), I really didn’t,” Patrick said while announcing her final races. “But I never said never because I know better.

And thank God, right? Because here I am.”

After a seven-year break from IndyCar, none of Patrick’s accomplishments in open-wheeled racing guaranteed an easy switch back from stock cars. She acknowledged that she was nervous.

Despite initial hiccups at her two-day test this month, such as struggling to put the car in neutral, you’d never know her last IndyCar race was in 2011. After four days of practice at IMS last week, she qualified seventh with a four-lap average of 228.090 mph.

“As a race-car driver, you just need to get out there and feel the car and get your feet back,” Patrick’s team owner and 500 pole-sitter Carpenter told IndyCar. “And she does have a lot of experience, and things change, but the way you drive this track, and the feel and the rhythm of it, it’s still the same as it was.”

For her final race weekend, Patrick is spending her scarce downtime surrounded by her loved ones: her mom and dad — she’s been living at their Indianapolis home all week — her sister and her boyfriend, Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who she said will attend his first IndyCar race.

And when she takes off her red, silver and blue helmet for the last time, it will be the end of an era for women in racing. Not because she’s the only one behind the wheel, but because for more than a decade, she has been the headliner for female drivers.

Patrick is at peace with her retirement from racing, especially with what she called a “perfect” ending, thanks to the teams that embraced her — Premium Motorsports at Daytona and Ed Carpenter Racing — her reunion with GoDaddy and ending her career with two of the most iconic races in the world.

But leaving the track hardly means she’s retiring altogether.

In the past few years, she’s transformed herself into an entrepreneur with a wine brand, Somnium, her health and fitness book, Pretty Intense, and her athleisure clothing line, Warrior by Danica Patrick. Her business ventures will become her focus moving forward.

“Danica wanted to create something that reflected her lifestyle,” said David Kupferberg, who works as the chief for Warrior while Patrick is the creative director.

“It was more like women’s empowerment — who she is and what she wanted to bring across as a female athlete and one of the only professional female athletes competing against men.”

With her company logos scattered across her bright green No. 13 Chevrolet and fire suit, Patrick will bring her racing career full circle with no regrets, “not even a single letter,” she joked Thursday, paraphrasing Jason Sudeikis in We’re the Millers.

She’s ready for what’s next.

“I’m not one of those people that wants to go back and change anything because I’m a work in progress,” Patrick previously told USA TODAY.

“I’ve earned every good and bad thing that’s happened to me through the decisions I’ve made and the actions I’ve taken — both positive and negative.

“They’re all part of the process, so I wouldn’t change anything in my life. I’m very happy where I’m at right now, and I might not be here if one thing would have been different at any point.”