Robin Miller (Left) and Danica Patrick (Right) chat before her practice session at Daytona International Speedway. (Image: SPEED)
John Roberts "Danica may be a newcomer to stock cars but she has a little bit of experience on the 2.5 mile track at Daytona. Danica has run the Rolex Series twice before, in '06 and '09. She also tested her IndyCar at the track in 2007, all of the experience though, on the road course. With more on her stock car debut, let’s go down to Robin Miller who is with Danica Patrick.
Robin Miller "Well, folks, all Danica all day. That is our new deal here on SPEED. Our call letters are gone, it’s the Danica Patrick show. No, actually we’re here for her first ARCA test. Well young lady, just let me say it looked awful this morning but I think we’ll run this afternoon."
Danica Patrick "Actually it is a perfect second for the jet dryer to show what’s happening. We’ll give them about five seconds, right, would you say?"
Robin Miller "I wouldn’t say five more seconds would work. When we talked off air, when you guys tested IndyCars here you got a chance to run a couple of corners here. I want to hear your opinion and hopefully this afternoon we’ll talk to you after the run. The first time you got to run down the straightaway at Indy and what that felt like going into turn one and what the comparable thing is here because a lot of guys say you have to learn how to slow down when you drive a stock car. It’s a completely different mindset."
Danica Patrick "It seems like it asks for a lot of patience and, also, just like comparison that I’ve already kind of felt is that when you go faster in an IndyCar, the faster you go, the more speed you get going the better it feels because you keep producing more down force but in these cars it seems like the faster you go, the more you move around. you are like oh boy; I was really slow with the throttle, really slow with the brake because you don’t want to upset it because it feels like it’s lifting up more. It will be interesting to see how it feels on these bigger tracks once you get going."
Robin Miller "One of the great secrets last week was your test at Disney World, in this day and age of Twitter and Facebook and all that. a couple of people on the internet said I think Danica is running and they were like, no that is the Richard Petty Driving School. You got to run 4 1/2 hours. Just your impression of the brakes. The completely different way you have to drive the car."
Danica Patrick "Yeah, you know, the brakes, they’re pretty good. They don’t lock the car up too quick. I feel like I can use quite a bit of pressure, still not the pressure reads that I’m getting in an IndyCar but I felt like I could get on them and the cars, they really are responsive to driver input so I found myself like getting into the corner, like getting off the brake and rolling a lot of speed and almost just kind of mid-corner dipping the brake a little bit and getting the nose down. That way I could get to full throttle sooner so that it didn’t just push all the way to the wall. Look at that, using the word push already."
Robin Miller "When Montoya and Gordon changed cars I’m standing with Gordon and he says wait until Montoya drives in turn one and thinks he’s going to put the brakes on and he is going to drive 100 yards deeper and think oh god, I have no brakes. So it was not that feeling at all. You were prepared for the fact that they do not have the brakes that IndyCars have?"
Danica Patrick "I kind of knew that. I mean, I drove a Busch car like I guess it was nine years ago actually. It was really funny, in the airport I saw one of the crew chiefs that day, and his name is Harold Holly. I saw him in the airport. and I didn’t recognize him because he cut his hair short. He had a mullet. And I didn’t recognize him after that and it was fun to reminisce about how that car felt but I remember the first thing I said was I remember, I told you check the brakes, they don’t work. I push on them and I feel like there’s air in the brakes or something. Sure enough, there was no air. So I don’t know if the cars have come along a little bit or not, but I had a pretty well prepared car the other day."
Robin Miller "The great thing I think about this whole story, not only the media frenzy and everybody is excited about the whole thing, but all the people I talk to, because I have lunch every week with a bunch of old IndyCar guys and we’re always fighting about what’s good and bad about racing. they’re like, well she is going to go into the series, she knows nothing about stock car racing, and it will be a daunting experience. How could it be any more daunting than going to England when you are 16 years old without your parents? Don't you think about that sometimes and go, boys I’ve been through this before?"
Danica Patrick "It’s a good similarity, good analogy because when I went to England I was excited but I also didn’t know what to expect. And it’s the same kind of thing. I’m excited but I really don’t know what to expect right now so I have a feeling that it’s one thing to drive all by yourself around but it’s another thing to add a whole bunch of other cars out there and start drafting and that whole thing. They’ve already started teaching me about how the air works off the side of the car and you use the side, the wind that gets cut from the front of the car and the side and pull out so it hits, I don’t know. There’s all kinds of stuff to learn. I started drawing pictures actually using boxes as cars and like, I’m trying to figure it out."
