In her third full-time season in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, Danica Patrick showed only minimal improvement in terms of her finishes on the track.
She finished 24th in the final points standings, up four spots from where she finished in 2014 and three spots better than she placed in her rookie season in 2013. She posted two top-10 finishes and led a total of seven laps, with an average start of 22.4 and an average finish of 23.5.
But here’s the rub: Patrick’s true value to Stewart-Haas Racing — indeed, to NASCAR as a whole — isn’t fully reflected in those numbers.
Here are some other numbers to consider: Patrick recently ranked fourth among the most-searched athletes of all sports on Yahoo in 2015, and ninth on Bing’s list of most-searched athletes. She was No. 1 among all NASCAR drivers on both lists.
While Patrick lost her long-time primary sponsor, GoDaddy.com, this season, she proved once again that she’s a marketing powerhouse by subsequently bringing three new sponsors into the sport. In an era when even some of the biggest driver names in the sport struggle at times to find full sponsorship for their cars, Patrick quickly locked up primary sponsorship for all 36 of her races in 2016.
Nature’s Bakery has agreed to serve in that role on her No. 10 SHR car for 28 races in a multi-year deal, while Aspen Dental and TaxAct have agreed to do so for four races each.
FOX NASCAR analyst Kenny Wallace said that illustrates Patrick’s true value as a driver — even if she never gets to the point where she’s winning races or contending for championships. He contended that much of the criticism she receives as the only female driver in NASCAR’s top series is therefore unfair.
She’s the complete package. She can drive the car. She brings the money.
– Kenny Wallace on Danica Patrick
“The bottom line is she’s doing what no other woman can do right now,” said Wallace, a former driver himself. “She’s the complete package. She can drive the car. She brings the money — and until anybody else can do what she’s doing, she cannot apologize for not being as good as some people want you to be.
“As far as I’m concerned, she’s probably keeping food on the table for 16 families and their children. She flat-out has earned it. If there is another male driver who can go out and bring in the kind of money she can, then maybe they can have her job.”
As far as on the track in 2015, Patrick’s top finishes were a seventh at Martinsville and a ninth at Bristol, both in the spring races at the two short tracks. That gives her six top-10 finishes in her career, the most by a woman driver in the history of NASCAR — surpassing Janet Guthrie by one.
After her best finish of the year at Martinsville, Patrick alluded to what she sees as a bright future at SHR.
“We can’t do well, I can’t do well, if the team doesn’t provide the people and the equipment that I need to perform,” she said. “And so a couple of years ago if you would have asked how we all felt everything was going on the team, there probably wouldn’t be a lot of positive things to say. But that’s an example of an organization digging deep and finding ways, and by all means the last couple of years here, we’ve been much stronger, and it makes it much more fun out there.”
As an indication of its commitment to her, Stewart-Haas Racing announced in August that it had signed Patrick to a multi-year contract extension.
