Lucky for Danica Patrick she’s a girl. Seriously. Or maybe it’s
lucky for her she’s as good as she is and thus worth gazillions in
television and other commercial revenue. As an overnight superstar
she’ll be immune from the scrutiny that would be heaped on a lesser
brand of Indy car driver.
But consider: on lap 155 of Sunday’s Indianapolis 500, under a
caution flag while the track was being cleared of debris from an
earlier accident, Patrick somehow lost control of her racer at a
mere 100 mph, spun out, and in the process collided with at least
two other race cars, knocking them out of the race. Her own car
escaped serious damage and she was able to have it repaired under
the extended caution laps she precipitated.
Now if this had been a Nascar race, or if the drivers victimized
by a careless rookie had been named Eddie Sachs or A.J. Foyt, the
guilty hotshot would afterward have been introduced to a few
punches in the nose and maybe a black eye. But these aren’t those
times. Tomas Scheckter, one of the affected drivers, said only,
“Danica lost it right in front of me… She got it wrong… a
little mistake but [with] big consequences for everybody else.” Not
that Patrick’s boss Bobby Rahal was gent enough to agree. He
dismissed those consequences as a case of “no harm, no foul.”
Needless to say, amid the hoopla and celebrification, none of
the coverage of Patrick’s performance pointed any blame at her for
the accident, if it even bothered to discuss it at all. She herself
admitted to making “some mistakes” during the race, but noted she
was a lot “more mad” at herself for stalling her engine during a
pit stop than for the spin — for which she not only didn’t
apologize but even suggested she was almost its victim. “I can’t
believe my car wasn’t completely demolished when I spun because I
got hit hard twice,” she said.
In case you think she’ll ever have second thoughts think again.
“That spin, I think, was something that needed to happen,” the
L.A. Times caught her saying.
An updated AP report did its own finger-pointing, on Patrick’s
behalf. She felt the problem was that the driver just in front of
her before the accident “purposefully slowed to trick drivers
trailing him,” the AP noted. “But she didn’t want to assess blame
until she saw a replay.” At least she wasn’t blaming the guys she
knocked out of the race.
Almost forgotten, in the all-Danica coverage, is that the race
was won by Dan Wheldon. He’s the first Briton to win in
Indianapolis since 1966. But the victory meant more to him than
that, because the winner 39 years ago was Graham Hill, a year after
the even greater Jim Clark won there. When Wheldon invoked their
names in his post-race comments, anyone who followed those two
would also have remembered that each was killed (Hill, to be sure,
in the crash of a plane he was piloting) long before the
26-year-old Wheldon was born.
Danica Patrick’s ascendancy is being hailed as a grand
achievement for women, girls, baby girls, and hard chargers of
every sort. Thanks to these gender obsessions, entirely forgotten
is that motor racing like no other sport requires dicing with
death. Let’s not kid ourselves. This is a deadly serious business,
whoever is competing. After Sunday’s race one very nervous wreck
could be seen on camera — Danica Patrick’s mother.
