Danica rides momentum toward ZZ Top's Texas

What seemed to impress Patrick the most was her ability to navigate with the tricky “three on the tree” transmission on the bright-red Bel Air. Lately, she’s been wheeling her NASCAR Sprint Cup Series ride pretty well, too.

Patrick helped ZZ Top announce their role as the pre-race entertainment before the 56th annual Coca-Cola 600 on May 24. Though Patrick was two days shy of her first birthday when the group’s best-selling “Eliminator” album first hit shelves in 1983, she said she was familiar with their rich portfolio of songs, owing in large part to her father T.J. and his love of classic rock.

“‘Legs’? I’m too short,” said Patrick, when asked about favorite tunes. “But I do have long legs for my height.”

Patrick’s buoyant mood wasn’t merely attributed to hanging out with music royalty on an otherwise cloudy Tuesday afternoon, but her impressive seventh-place finish in the Sprint Cup tour’s most recent race on March 29 at Martinsville Speedway. That momentum, plus a relaxing off-weekend spent in part attending a wedding for friends in Charleston, South Carolina, has her recharged for Saturday night’s resumption of the schedule at Texas Motor Speedway (7:30 p.m. ET, FOX).

“It really felt like two weekends. So, feeling really good, really refreshed,” said Patrick, nine races into her tenure with crew chief Daniel Knost. “Had a nice weekend, but really, just encouraged by the start of the season and how it’s gone so far. … We’ve been to every style of track now, so I’m feeling confident in that and that we really only have up to go, based on how new our relationship is together as a driver and crew chief.”

Patrick acknowledged that the results haven’t necessarily illustrated the performance boost for her Stewart-Haas Racing No. 10 Chevrolet, but that the driver/crew chief partnership with Knost is still in the early stages of taking hold. Martinsville produced potential strides and a seven-position bump to 15th in the series standings, but Texas and beyond will tell the tale of Patrick’s third full season in NASCAR’s big league.

“Building good cars, using all the resources that we have at Stewart-Haas and just giving me cars that were good from the get-go as soon as we get to the race track,” Patrick said. “Now I think that there is definitely plenty of room to improve on our communication that allows for a lot of good changes throughout the weekend. You’re not always going to make the car better with everything that you do, but you need to do it throughout the weekend here and there.

“Sometimes we’re better at it than other times. That’s still a work in progress, but the start setup has been really solid so far everywhere this year.”

Patrick did more than her part to promote not only her role in the Coca-Cola family of drivers, but also one of NASCAR’s signature events. But at other stages of her motorsports career, the month of May meant something far different — a chance to swig the winner’s traditional milk in the Indianapolis 500.

Though Patrick has kept open the possibility of attempting an Indy/Coke double, much like teammate Kurt Busch did last year and team owner/driver Tony Stewart accomplished before him, the further she gets away from IndyCar racing, the less appealing the opportunity is.

“For two years, I thought ‘let’s try and do this’ and it just didn’t work out,” Patrick said. “I’m comfortable, but for me it has a lot more to do with, I don’t want to do the race just to do the race unless I’m able to feel like I have a chance to win then that’s the only reason why I want to do it. And there’s a lot of people who show up for the 500 that end up having a shot and doing really well, and I feel like I could, but the further I get away from those cars and driving them, the less I feel confident in that I would be able to do what I would feel like I need to do to win.

“Every year I was there, I pretty much had a chance to win, and I don’t want to do anything to take away from that.”

Though Charlotte Motor Speedway‘s annual festival of speed in May is just more than six weeks away, ZZ Top welcomed the chance for a 45-minute show just before their kicking off a 15-city European tour in June. Marcus Smith, CEO of track ownership group Speedway Motorsports, Inc., said choosing the group as the pre-race show wasn’t the result of focus groups or other more scientific methods.

“Because they’re awesome, man. They’re ZZ Top,” Smith said. “They’re legendary. This is the 56th running of the Coca-Cola and we wanted to go over the top, and I think ZZ Top is just one of the most iconic, classic rock American bands out there.”

When ZZ Top formed in Houston, Texas, in 1969, NASCAR had just begun its third decade of operation. That year’s premier series schedule was 54 races long, still featured dirt tracks, and included a newly built Talladega Superspeedway in the wilds of Alabama. Pearson, Petty and Isaac ruled the season in cars with names like Cyclone, Torino and Charger Daytona.

As NASCAR was poised to enter its so-called “modern era,” ZZ Top also was developing its trademark blues-heavy rock and boogie sound. Though the band evolved from its hardscrabble origins, becoming a pop-friendly MTV darling during the peak of their commercial success in the 1980s before returning to its guitar-driven roots, their lineup has remained the same for 45 years.

“There’s one song that we started writing when we first got together as a group. It’s yet to be finished,” Gibbons said with a laugh. “Long, long time on that one.”

The band’s ability to play to big rooms hasn’t changed either, and the venues don’t get much bigger than Charlotte Motor Speedway‘s 1.5-mile track. ZZ Top is no newcomer to NASCAR. The band played two pre-race shows in 2008, at Auto Club Speedway in March and a home-state appearance at Texas Motor Speedway in November. Given Gibbons’ love of hot rods — from the band’s signature “Eliminator” ’33 Ford to the custom ’48 “CadZZilla” — the stock-car pairing seems only natural.

“They ask us many times what the connection between ZZ Top and the automobile is,” Gibbons said. “We say, well, it’s loud and fast, and that kind of makes sense.”

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