One thing missing from Danica Patrick's season: a victory

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Danica Patrick's first season in the Indy Racing League has been a blur of accomplishments: a front-row start and fourth-place finish in Japan, then a heady and historic run in the Indianapolis 500, then her first pole position 10 days ago.

What Patrick has not done, at least not yet, is win. The Firestone Indy 200 on Saturday in Nashville will be only her ninth race in the top open-wheel series, but Patrick has driven the expectations so high that another loss might look like the start of a slump.

Is that fair? Patrick, 23, who on May 29 became the first woman to lead the Indy 500, said Tuesday on a conference call that she could wait a little while for a victory. She would love to win, she said. But she seems to have more patience than the general public.

"I can understand how this sort of thing happens," she said. "When you get so much attention and everything, people seem to think this is what you have to do, you have to win. I don't go out there and say, 'Put me in as many newspapers and magazines as you can.' It's just what happened."

Patrick is 10th in the Indy Racing League standings entering the race at Nashville Superspeedway, a 1.33-mile concrete oval. She said she had been to Nashville, but not to the racetrack. She faces another rapid learning curve this week.

"With her experience in the past, the race team she's with, I think she has everything she needs to get through the learning curve," Buddy Lazier, a veteran driver, said of Patrick, who drives for Rahal Letterman Racing. "But it is a huge learning curve as a rookie year. I think we can all anticipate bigger and better things from her after she's sort of got her bearings in the series."

Two weeks after the Indy 500, Patrick posted the third-fastest qualifying speed for a race in Fort Worth, but she dropped back in the pack and finished 13th. She won the pole for the July 3 race in Kansas City, Kan., but faded again and finished ninth.

Patrick qualified poorly for a race in Richmond, Va., that was held between the races in Texas and Kansas. Although she finished 10th, she started 21st, and her inexperience seemed to scrub off some of her luster.

"I understand that sometimes there's going to be a downfall," she said Tuesday. "Sometimes there's going to be a bit of backlash or something. I understand there's going to be some backtracking at some point. There has to be. I mean, not everybody wins every race."

Though she has not won one, she has become the story of the open-wheel season. Patrick was asked Tuesday if she had to travel with a bodyguard - "Goodness, no," she said - and she has not resorted to wearing sunglasses and a floppy hat in public.

"You know, I think she has to deal with it, and she's been dealing with it in a very, very good way," Tomas Scheckter, 24, who won at Texas, said Tuesday. "She's been driving very sensibly. She's been finishing races."

Later, Scheckter said: "We really needed something to attract a mass of people to start watching it. For sure it seems to have caught on. I think Danica's played a big part in that."

Patrick now heads into the most demanding part of the IRL season. There will be races three weekends in a row, one weekend off, then three more weekends of racing. But she will race July 24 at Milwaukee, where she has raced before.

"Well, it will be nice to get onto a track that you just kind of know where the bumps are, you kind of know where the seams are in the track, you have a good feel for the size of it," she said. "But it's going to be coming at me much faster now."

She meant that literally. Once again, Patrick will be driving on a track that sits smack-dab in NASCAR country. The winner of Saturday's race, in fact, receives a guitar. But Patrick said she was happy to race open-wheel cars. She is doing what she wants to do.

She might not be driving as fast as she wants, or as fast as fans might expect her to drive, but she said she would be working on that this week. She will watch video and ask her teammates for advice. Patrick, in other words, will do what any other rookie will do.
"I don't feel like I'm rushing," she said. "I'm also a competitor, and I always want to win. I always want to do better. You walk that fine line of self-destruction if you expect to win every single time or if you have to every time."

By DAVE CALDWELL
The New York Times