Patrick owes her phenomenal cachet not simply to gender to glamour, but to her
undeniable gifts behind the wheel. She is the only woman ever to win an
IndyCar Series race. She finished third at the Indianapolis 500 in 2009.
She began go-karting in Wisconsin aged just 10 and spent three years in
England, racing against Jenson Button and claiming a runner’s-up finish in
the Formula Ford festival. Not for nothing is she considered the finest
female driver in the history of American open-wheel racing.
So her transition to stock cars was to be expected. Nascar is, by some
distance, the most followed form of motor sports in the US, affording
Patrick the degree of recognition she has sought since high school.
The only pity was that her first Daytona 500 appearance should have been
marred by a third-lap crash, before eventually trailing home in 38th place.
But then this is a sport that loves a wreck, so long as nobody is hurt,
which means the Danica publicity machine survives unscathed.
The conundrum is how Patrick herself wishes to be perceived. On the one hand
she is quite content to take the money of FHM and even Playboy
to drape herself over bonnets in various states of undress. But on the
other, she apparently recoils from being defined, in a business sense, by
her femininity.
Taking issue with the label of ‘sex symbol, she retorted: “People just don’t
know what to call women who look attractive.” Such is the insistence upon
political correctness around her that when Ross Shimabuku, a Fox anchor in
San Diego, argued, “What’s not attractive is that she’s sexy and she knows
it,” he was suspended for a week without pay.
The final frontier for Patrick is, naturally, Formula
One. During her time in England, she maintained that F1 was all she
ever wanted to do. Bernie Ecclestone, in resurrecting the US Grand Prix in
Austin, sounded amenable to the idea: “To have someone like in Danica
Patrick in F1 would be the perfect advert.”
Granted, this is the same man who sparked consternation on the same subject in
2005, when he asserted that women “should be dressed in white — like all the
other domestic appliances”. He later apologised by sending Patrick a
Christmas present.
The traditional male hegemony in F1 has been fitfully challenged. In the
Fifties, Maria Teresa de Filippis shared a grid with Juan Manuel Fangio.
Lella Lombardi was celebrated as the one woman to have scored a world
championship point — strictly speaking, half a point — in achieving sixth
place at the 1975 Spanish Grand Prix, a race stopped prematurely after a
crash killed several spectators.
Patrick, while adamant in her desire to stay in the US, represents the
marketing phenomenon Ecclestone craves. By her instant impact in Nascar, she
has infiltrated an arena fuelled as much by gasoline as raw testosterone.
Ultimately, she could find the challenge of shredding the same enduring
preconceptions in F1 too tempting to turn down.