Miller: Danica and Simona deserve more credit

Danica Patrick and Simona De Silvestro have been in the headlines this past week but not necessarily for all the right reasons.

Let’s start with the firestorm created when Richard Petty said Patrick could only win a NASCAR race if “everybody else stayed at home." Her fans howled in protest and the old school USAC racers I dine with every Friday howled with delight.

So let’s try and do a little rational thinking about what seems to be a highly irrational topic.

First off all, King Richard’s assessment is 90 percent accurate. Unless there is a major pileup, DP is never going to win at Bristol, Darlington, Martinsville, Dover, Phoenix, Texas, Michigan, Charlotte, Atlanta, Pocono, Kentucky, Richmond, Loudon, Fontana, Watkins Glen or Sonoma. She’s not aggressive enough, can’t run loose enough, isn’t strong enough, you fill in the blank.

But don’t tell me she can’t win Daytona or Talladega. She damn near won the Nationwide show at Daytona a couple years ago with Tony Stewart’s help and she ran in the lead pack in last year’s Daytona 500 until the very end.

Those two superspeedways are about teamwork, learning the draft and luck. Talent is a distant fourth.

You want more evidence? Michael Waltrip has four wins in his 50-year career: two at Daytona and two at Talladega.

What’s a little unsettling to me is the perception that Patrick is a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model who wears a driver’s suit on the weekends and only has a ride because she’s a sexy marketing tool.

She only has a NASCAR ride because she’s got GoDaddy as a sponsor.

She’s cultivated her relationship with GoDaddyY because she’s a lightning rod in one of the most popular forms of entertainment in North America. And because she’s a tiny woman in a macho arena and she’s popular with fans and media.

Would she have a Sprint Cup ride without GoDaddy? Of course not. Are people jealous because she makes $15 million a year? Absolutely.

Do some die-hard fans and longtime competitors bristle because she’s featured in USA Today all the time? Check.

Does it irk people that she’s always mentioned in the ESPN crawl for a Cup race? Yep.

But the anti-Danica faction that was also prevalent in IndyCar needs a little refreshing of the memory.

She was attractive to Argent, Motorola and GoDaddy because she went fast in an Indy car and had some really good races during her seven seasons. And I’m not talking about the 2005 Indy 500 when she drove into the national spotlight.

I’m talking about when she charged from 14th to fourth at Milwaukee, ran third in the insanity of Texas, finished third in the Indy 500, qualified seventh at Watkins Glen and had a cut-throat duel with Tony Kanaan at Homestead for second place.

Or when her car twitched in the middle of Turn 1 at Indianapolis in qualifying and she stayed in the throttle at 223mph.

She had “ovaries" (her word) in an Indy car, wasn’t afraid to mix it up and was more comfortable at the fast ovals. When I read people saying she’s no Janet Guthrie or Lyn St. James, I nod in agreement: they’re right, Danica was competitive in an Indy car.

Nothing that is said or written will change people’s minds but don’t be too dismissive. Patrick ain’t much of a stock car driver and she’ll continue to struggle and be criticized, vilified etc. But she succeeded at a place and in a car that a lot of those NASCAR boys (past and present) wanted no part of and, for that alone, deserves a lot more respect than she gets. More at Racer.com