"While the results haven’t been great, it’s been a little bit better than I thought it would be," Patrick said on Thursday following her visit Arizona Call-A-Teen Youth Resources, Inc, which was the winner of GoDaddy’s Got Your Back contest. "I was a little scared at the end of last year with how we were going in practice and just how everything was going in general. The races were a little better than everything else, but they still weren’t very good."
Patrick is in her third full-time season in the sport’s top series but is in her first full season with Daniel Knost atop the pit box as the series pulls into Phoenix International Raceway for Sunday’s CampingWorld.com 500 (3:30 p.m. ET, FOX). Knost and Tony Gibson traded crew chief duties on the No. 10 team and the No. 41 team of Kurt Busch with three races left in the 2014 season. Knost is in just his second year as a crew chief and has one race win atop the pit box, which came with Busch last season at Martinsville in March.
In her three races with Knost last season, Patrick finished 36th at Texas Motor Speedway, 22nd at Phoenix International and 18th at Homestead-Miami Speedway for an average finish of 25.3. This came after the sudden crew chief change, which took Gibson, with whom Patrick had made significant strides in qualifying and on intermediate tracks, to another team in the SHR stable.
"There’s been a lot more hope in the races of being in the top-15 and having more speed than I expected based on the end of last year," Patrick said.
This season, with Knost as the full-time crew chief after his interim label was removed in January, Patrick came out with a 21st-place showing at Daytona, followed by 16th at Atlanta Motor Speedway and 27th at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Patrick offered a few reflections on the first three races.
"I felt like Daytona was what it was," Patrick said. "It’s hard to really use that as the barometer to what the temperature of the season is going to be."
"With Atlanta, we had a chance to be in the top 10 if we wouldn’t have had some of our issues.
"Last weekend at Vegas, I restarted 12th after the first yellow. It was fine and unfortunately based on our lack of experience together, (we) made wrong changes. I said what the car was doing and maybe I pushed him in the wrong direction, I don’t know. But the changes that we made for the next two stops made me slower and slower. And then we went back on them and finally we were OK again. We just needed something different. Instead of taking the change out that didn’t really do anything, we just kind of piled things on to it and just went slower. Once we got things back where we started, we were actually not too bad but the damage was done."
The year before with Gibson at Atlanta, Patrick scored her best career finish in NASCAR’s premier series with a sixth-place result. Her progress in 2014 was something that impressed teammate and 2014 Sprint Cup Series champion Kevin Harvick.
"Last year I thought she had, until to the very end of the year, a really good year." Harvick said on Friday at Phoenix.
The driver of the No. 4 Chevrolet SS also offered some constructive thoughts.
"I thought she raced well, didn’t finish, some of the situations she was in to capitalize on a top 15," Harvick said. "For her situation, I think 10th to 15th are realistic goals and really trying to build on those finishes and get some top 10s along the way, which she did."
The shared history of two years of work with the veteran wrench of Gibson, while coming into something new with Knost, is something that will take time for both driver and crew chief.
"I feel like we had done a good job of knowing, they learn and I learned at the same time, just what things I needed in a car to feel comfortable," Patrick said of her time with Gibson at the helm of the No. 10 team. "The changes that were actually effective, that moved the needle for me. I did learn some and that’s what’s helping now. I didn’t completely grasp everything. Like I didn’t understand completely what we were doing with the front of the car that made me comfortable or the back. I could only say in generalities the things that I am pretty sure were needle movers for me and gut instincts, like I’ve been here before, we did this. That’s what’s helping move the needle faster now, but it still can’t bridge the gap between something that you spent two years working on to something that you’ve been working on for a couple of races."
That said, Patrick also sees a lot of hope in what has transpired so far.
"What is exciting is the potential of what could be because we are both so green. So far, we’ve worked really well together. It’s been really easy."
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