The Stupidity Of Danica Mania

During NASCAR's awards banquet weekend in New York, Bobby Rahal defended Danica Patrick, this despite a near-total void of criticism of her. "Patrick won three poles and had two top fives.....Her fourth-place finish at the Indianapolis 500......vaulted her to the cover of Sports Illustrated."

The story neglects to mention that she never finished in the top five again in the 2005 IRL season and fell out of the top ten in points from Indy on, this despite having one of the strongest cars in the field week after week.

And here we see the nonsense of Bobby Rahal's assertion that "Women face every negative that there is out there." It is difficult to square this assertion with reality, where press coverage of female racers is consistently fawning and criticism is all but nowhere to be found.

NASCAR Sportsman Series team owner Tad Geschtickter chimes in by saying, "She (Patrick) can't be a novelty, she can't be a gimmick." Trouble is she can be a gimmick - she was irrelevent to the IRL season once the field figured her out, and Rahal misses the point when he says, "there will be the complete expectation that she is going to win," because in 2005 she was able to sneak up on the field; now she can't.

Danica Mania helped get Erin Crocker into NASCAR and she responded by wrecking in all her BGN and Truck starts in 2005. Rahal claims female racers are held to a higher standard to define success, but the utter lack of criticism of Patrick shows otherwise, and Geschtickter's defense of Erin Crocker shows the real standard held to female racers - "if you looked at them closely, I'll bet you 80 percent of them were because people were driving over their heads around her. They were saying, 'I've gotta pass her, I've gotta pass her.'"

This is fraudulence, because in her wrecks she lost control, not other cars. At Richmond she spun out in practice and again in the race. At Memphis she tried to force the issue entering a corner even though Steve Grissom had the corner, and the result was another wreck.

Far from being held to a higher standard, female racers are not held to any serious standard of success. Any kind of criticism is met with scorn and defensiveness, utterly lacking any kind of objectivity. It showed very graphically in Deborah Renshaw's excuse for a career and it shows again with Erin Crocker and Danica Patrick.

Racing is supposed to be about tough guys - guys like Tomas Scheckter, the Foyts, the Andrettis, Sam Hornish, Tony Stewart, the Pettys, the Woods, the Earnhardts, etc. Danica Patrick is making motorsports LESS appealing instead of more.