Most drivers would be pleased to earn a top-10 finish in the most important race of the season, and even more so if it was that driver’s best finish ever in the series.
That is exactly what Danica Patrick achieved in Sunday’s NASCAR Sprint Cup Daytona 500. Add to that her being the first female driver to win the Daytona pole and the first to lead laps at Daytona, and it sounds like the Sprint Cup rookie had quite a day.
Yet, when she stepped from her car after finishing eighth, even her most media-savvy acting job couldn’t hide the disappointment oozing out of her. Patrick worked hard to find the positives, but she looked heartbroken.
“I would imagine that pretty much anyone would kick themselves and say, ‘What could I have, should have, done to give myself that opportunity to win?’” Patrick told NASCAR.com.
“I kept thinking about that [how to win] the whole time,” she elaborated on ESPN. “You spend a lot of time thinking about what you’re going to do when that opportunity comes—it’s just tough to tell. I kept asking [my spotter] what looked like it was working. You needed a hole, you needed people to help you out.”
“You know, I had a little bit of help here today, here and there,” she continued, trying to strike a positive note. “I felt like if I were to dive low, I had a feeling I was going to get freight-trained.”
In fact, it was because she didn’t dive low that she got freight-trained—passed by a long line of cars that wouldn’t let her in.
