With SHR and GoDaddy deals up, this is a big year for Patrick
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Entering the 2015 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season, Danica Patrick is focused on the chance to build off the gains she felt she made last season. Even with that, there is plenty of other buzz around one of the sport's most popular drivers.
The Stewart-Haas Racing driver has a new crew chief as she enters her third season in NASCAR's top series. The third season is often the measuring stick for a driver with team and sponsorship deals often coinciding with that length. Coincidentally, Patrick's deals with Stewart-Haas and her primary sponsor, GoDaddy, are both up at the end of the year.
For her part, Patrick does not desire a change.
"Stewart-Haas is an amazing team, and I have no issues here," Patrick said during the Charlotte Motor Speedway Media Tour presented by Technocom. "It's been the closest thing to family.
"Obviously in the early days of wanting to run NASCAR, I've been lucky enough to have a great sponsor like GoDaddy and have the faith of the people around me that I could really name the team I wanted to drive for, and Tony and Gene made it happen, and GoDaddy made it happen. … I didn't even want to run anywhere else necessarily; I didn't pick to run anywhere else, and I still don't."
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Patrick also dismissed any talk of driving a Formula One car. Stewart Haas-Racing co-owner Gene Haas is starting up an F1 team for the 2016 campaign.
Haas sees great value in Patrick and would like to keep her in the fold.
"We'd love to see Danica come back," Haas said. "She's a big draw, and we want to see Danica's success as much as anyone does. I think NASCAR wants to see her success. … We're very fortunate to have someone like Danica here."
While her rookie season of 2013 brought a season-opening Coors Light Pole Award at the Daytona 500, Patrick registered only one top-10 (an eighth-place finish in the Daytona 500), four top-15s and a 27th-place finish in the final point standings. Outside of the Daytona races, she never started in the top 12.
That changed in 2014, when Patrick made several significant strides. She started in the top-12 seven times at a wide variety of tracks (ranging from restrictor plate venues to intermediates to short tracks and road courses). She scored three top-10 finishes, including a career-best sixth-place result at Atlanta Motor Speedway on Labor Day weekend.
Her average starting position went from 30.1 in 2013 to 22.3 in 2014 and her average finishing position went from 26.1 in 2013 to 23.7 in 2014. And while the end result was a 28th-place finish in the final standings, her overall improvement was not unnoticed.
"The results didn't show it, but she had speed at a lot of race tracks that she didn't have at the year before," said Tony Stewart, SHR co-owner, teammate and three-time champion.
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Patrick considers the 2014 season a success, although she acknowledged that her final position in the standings wasn't reflective of how she felt she had run.
"Progress is the standard," Patrick said when asked about measuring how she is doing in the sport's top series. "I don't think the championship standings really reflected what happened last year. There were many, many more times where I qualified in the top-12 or right there in the top-15 and that was a huge step in the right direction. ... Restarts were definitely much better, especially when we got the car a little bit dialed in. Overall speed in practice was much better. All I can do is look to those things that I want to improve on and see if they have."
Now it is about taking that next step, where the speed is always there and those top-15s and top-20s become top-10s on a regular basis. And the key person in getting that progress out of the driver of the No. 10 Chevrolet SS will be crew chief Daniel Knost. SHR made a crew chief swap for the final three races of 2014 with Tony Gibson moving over to Kurt Busch's No. 41 team, while Knost came over to the No. 10 team with the interim tag.
In their three races together, Patrick averaged a finish of 25.3, with her best result an 18th-place finish in the season-finale at Homestead. The interim tag was removed from Knost's title this offseason. Like all new pairings, hitting the ground running is easier said than done and Patrick is not blind to that fact.
"I'm sure there will be a little bit of a learning curve but I think we can overcome that sooner than later," Patrick said.
Patrick added that Knost's background as an engineer is something she is used to and she welcomes the new perspective that comes with a new pit boss.
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Greg Zipadelli, a former championship-winning crew chief with Stewart and the Vice President of Competition at SHR, liked what he saw from the pairing at the end of 2014 and said it was important to keep continuity within the SHR organization for Patrick.
"It just seemed like they were working better together," Zipadelli said. "We didn't want to bring somebody from the outside, that didn't know our program, didn't know our tools. We didn't feel like that was going to be beneficial to her."
Only time will tell if the pairing is the right fit. Eighty-two races into her Sprint Cup Series career, Patrick has yet to record a top-five finish or a win. Could a trip to Victory Lane be in the offing in 2015?
"I can't guarantee anything," Patrick said. "... I have all the confidence that I need to do it. I definitely believe and know I can win."