The Official Danica Patrick Fan Site

NASCAR Pre-Season Testing - 2013

Here is a post to capture all information on the Pre-Season testing starting today...

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Permalink Reply by Becky on January 10, 2013 at 12:50pm

Danica ended up 3rd in the first session at Daytona after spending most of the session in last after some early mechanical issues.

The morning sessions are being streamed at nascar.com and the afternoon sessions are on Speed.

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Permalink Reply by Becky on January 10, 2013 at 7:20pm

Speed sheets for today's two sessions...

AM Session...Danica 3rd on the speed chart at 192.583mph

http://www.jayski.com/stats/2013/pdfs/dis2013test-day1am.pdf

PM Session...Danica 7th on the speed chart at 192.934mph

http://www.jayski.com/stats/2013/pdfs/dis2013test-day1pm.pdf

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Permalink Reply by Daniel on January 10, 2013 at 7:40pm

Sweet

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Permalink Reply by Shayne C on January 10, 2013 at 7:54pm

This was on Danica's FB page regarding Indy...

Danica on the Indy 500: "I can confirm to you today that I will not be doing the Indy 500. I am just going to do the Coke 600. The team and I decided to focus on Cup. It's going to be plenty of work as it is. It's going to be important for me running for the championship full-time for the first time to really keep myself focused with the Cup car. But if I do the Indy 500 moving forward it will be with GoDaddy." (www.facebook.com/DanicaPatrick, 2012)

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Permalink Reply by vern m on January 10, 2013 at 10:26pm

Shayne C said:

This was on Danica's FB page regarding Indy...

Danica on the Indy 500: "I can confirm to you today that I will not be doing the Indy 500. I am just going to do the Coke 600. The team and I decided to focus on Cup. It's going to be plenty of work as it is. It's going to be important for me running for the championship full-time for the first time to really keep myself focused with the Cup car. But if I do the Indy 500 moving forward it will be with GoDaddy." (www.facebook.com/DanicaPatrick, 2012)

Good grief--Some media people need to wake up and pay attention and learn to ask her relevant questions given Daytona preseason Testing has started, as this Indy500 question was asked and answered by her at a nascar race press conference months ago.

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Permalink Reply by Becky on January 10, 2013 at 10:31pm

Probably a good decision although I'd like to see her make the attempt... I did find it interesting that she specifically said if she does the Indy500 in the future that it will be with GoDaddy. This makes me think there must already be a provision in her contract with GoDaddy to support this effort if/when she wants to attempt it in the future.

Shayne C said:

This was on Danica's FB page regarding Indy...

Danica on the Indy 500: "I can confirm to you today that I will not be doing the Indy 500. I am just going to do the Coke 600. The team and I decided to focus on Cup. It's going to be plenty of work as it is. It's going to be important for me running for the championship full-time for the first time to really keep myself focused with the Cup car. But if I do the Indy 500 moving forward it will be with GoDaddy." (www.facebook.com/DanicaPatrick, 2012)

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Permalink Reply by Becky on January 10, 2013 at 10:33pm

Not surprisingly there are a lot of Danica articles from the first day of testing...

Here is the link to the video of her press conference today:

http://rpm2night.com/media/danica-patrick-and-tony-stewart-video-in...

Some ESPN articles:

http://espn.go.com/racing/nascar/cup/story/_/id/8832964/nascar-dani...

http://espn.go.com/racing/indycar/story/_/id/8832438/danica-patrick...

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Permalink Reply by Becky on January 10, 2013 at 10:36pm

An article from Bob Pockrass that touches on her expectations, testing, and the Indy decision...

http://aol.sportingnews.com/nascar/story/2013-01-10/danica-patrick-...

Probably the best thing I saw in the article is the following...love to see her getting lots of track time:

She said the team plans a short-track test for her early next week and then will participate in the NASCAR test Jan. 17-18 at Charlotte Motor Speedway. The team will then evaluate her performance and see if it needs to test more before the season starts a month later at Daytona.

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Permalink Reply by Becky on January 11, 2013 at 9:09am

Another recap from yesterday's test...

http://www.nascar.com/en_us/news-media/articles/2013/01/10/danica-p...

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Permalink Reply by David Williams on January 11, 2013 at 5:56pm

That is a very nice, friendly, upbeat article, and it's very gratifying to read something like that about her more or less first day full-time in Sprint Cup. I hope everyone keeps expectations realistic. Danica has proved many times that she is not intimidated by speed. What is more difficult is dealing with other drivers in traffic in an actual race, drivers who often do not have very friendly attitudes toward her.

But it helps me a lot to remember that not very long ago I was concerned about the difficulty she seemed to be having in learning to drive a loose stock car. It seems to me clear that she has now learned how to drive a loose stock car, without anyone even remarking on it. I was watching a recording of the RoadAmerica race last night and was struck by how she was rapidly moving that steering wheel right and left to stay on her line, a sign that the car was loose, but looking quite comfortable and unperturbed by it all. And her performance in that race says all that needs to be said.

Becky said:

Another recap from yesterday's test...

http://www.nascar.com/en_us/news-media/articles/2013/01/10/danica-p...

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Permalink Reply by Damon on January 12, 2013 at 7:03am

Lots of cars torn up yesterday during drafting practice, thankfully Danica was not out there when that mess happened and Chad Knaus (as usual), gets it right by not having Jimmie draft in January preseason testing at Daytona.

No need to take chances drafting/wrecking, especially when there just aren't enough parts/pieces out there yet with this new car, nor are there nearly enough new cars that have been built by the teams in general to take that chance and end up getting behind, which is why several of them packed up after the wreck and went home - they only brought one car.