Danica Patrick is hoping to carry momentum to Kansas from Talladega, where Sunday she led six laps in the Aaron’s 499, becoming the first woman to lead at the 2.66-mile superspeedway. Yes, we’re talking about Danica Patrick leading laps, a story about her leading laps?
Yes, that’s where we’re at now. Seriously. Because in Danica’s case, this is in fact news. You can only write so many Danica Patrick finished in 27th place stories. So how’d she finish at the track made famous by Ricky Bobby?
She finished 22nd at Talladega after overheating issues caused her to fall back.
Oh, ok.
What a difference then.
Anyways, in advance of Kansas City Danica Patrick talked about leading laps.
“It was good out front. I wish I could have stayed there. We had heating issues. I (the car) was getting hot a lot. I think you saw that from a lot of cars. It was a hot day there in Talladega. When you get back a little bit in the field, it gets even worse. I think I was the second back in the second lane really early on and it just felt like it kind of died a little bit.”
“Then I started getting passed. So I dropped back to get some clean air. Got some track position a couple of times and got up there a little bit, but heating was definitely an issue. It really limited me to the bottom lane because, as soon as it jumped up, it went there.”
“The good news is this car is going to get to go to Daytona. That is a positive. The result was not necessarily too much of a positive, but it got rolled up onto the truck, so that is more than a lot of people can say coming from a speedway,” Danica Patrick said.
Paul M. Banks owns The Sports Bank.net,an affiliate of Fox Sports. A frequent analyst on national talk radio, Banks is a former contributor to NBC Chicago and the Washington Times, He’s even been featured on the History Channel. President Obama follows him on Twitter (@paulmbanks)