Will Danica race in Daytona 500? You can bet on it

Will Danica race in Daytona 500? You can bet on it

(September 9, 2011)

RICHMOND, Va.—Danica Patrick says she'd like to make her Sprint Cup debut in the 2012 Daytona 500.

Tony Stewart, the car owner who will support an abbreviated Cup schedule for Patrick next season, says no decision has been made.

Nevertheless, this one you can take to the bank: Danica Patrick will race in the Daytona 500 next year. Why? Because competing in the Great American Race is a marketing opportunity too big for Patrick and sponsor GoDaddy.com to pass up.

Marketing is a vital part of Patrick's thought process, whether it's in deciding to come to NASCAR racing full time or in choosing the races she'll run. If that weren't the case, she wouldn't have chosen a baseball field to announce her original NASCAR plans in 2009—instead of a more logical place like, say, a racetrack.

And she might have appeared somewhere other than at her sponsor's headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz.—far from the inquiring minds of those who cover NASCAR racing on a weekly basis—to announce last month that she would run a full Nationwide Series and partial Cup schedule next year.

"GoDaddy's input is important—yes," Patrick said Friday at Richmond International Raceway, when asked about her Cup plans for 2012. "It is, and they'll play a part. But they're also very respectful enough to understand that I'm the driver and that the team owners (Dale Earnhardt Jr. in Nationwide and Stewart in Cup) are drivers, too."

Stewart and Patrick have discussed the Cup schedule in broad strokes, but they're waiting for the entire NASCAR schedule to be released before they solidify plans for next year.

"When I first talked to Tony about it, he thought that maybe going to some of the tougher tracks and getting a head start on learning them would be the best, which means I'm really going to look like crap out there," Patrick said. "I don't know where they'll be, but I only imagine it will be challenging tracks like Darlington or Dover or Bristol."

Wherever else Patrick races in the Cup series, if you bet that her Cup debut will be somewhere other than Daytona, you might as well hand over the money right now.

By Reid Spencer

Sporting News NASCAR Wire Service