Is Nascar's next Danica Patrick coming down the track?
When Patrick embarked on her career, she was the only woman at the track more often than not. But things have changed
It’s been a few months since Danica Patrick called time on her racing career. It was a good run that included five full seasons at Nascar’s top level. And though she didn’t quite achieve the results she had hoped for, or meet the immense expectations thrust upon her, she proved to be much faster than any of her female predecessors and much more famous than many, many male athletes – not least the ones in her own sport. On Wednesday she’ll host ESPN’s ESPYs awards show and join Lance Armstrong, LeBron James, John Cena and Peyton Manning as the only athletes to do so in the program’s 26-year history. She figures to draw a crowd to the primetime ABC telecast, just as she brought scores of female fans into Nascar every Sunday – inspiring more than a few to follow in her pioneering tracks. It makes you wonder: is the next Danica Patrick much further behind?
“I don’t think we’re that far away from one of ‘em stepping up,” says Keith Kunz, a grassroots-level team owner who’s in the business of finding and developing future stock car stars. “There a lot more opportunities for girls to showcase their talent.”
Nascar has taken great pains to make sure of this. In 2004, six years before Patrick made her Nascar debut, the league launched a program called Drive for Diversity with the idea of creating opportunities for minorities and women to join the sport. While Drive for Diversity has proven to be successful in moving drivers of color up the development ladder – as evidenced by the major-league promotions of Kyle Larson (who is Japanese-American), Daniel Suarez (who is Mexican) and Bubba Wallace (who is black) into the Cup series – young women haven’t fared nearly as well. This despite the fact that a third of the drivers admitted to the program have been young white women in the Patrick mold, as illustrated in a recent survey by The Undefeated.
Nevertheless, industry insiders remain optimistic about the prospects of a young woman driver breaking through. They point to the undeniable impact that Patrick has had on the grassroots level of stock car racing, which may not be obvious to those who only look at Nascar from the top down. “Before we were lucky to see one girl come along every couple of years,” Kunz says. “But over the last five years or so there’s definitely been a rise in girls and women participating.”
When Patrick embarked on her motorsports career more than 20 years ago, she was the only girl at the track far more often than not. What’s more, she specialized in racing open-wheel cars, a discipline that eventually compelled a move to Europe during her teenage years – and made for an even lonelier road. Today’s young women drivers don’t have to wander so far afield for stock car seasoning, however. They can get it much closer to home steering “late model,” “midget” or “sprint” cars on slick dirt tracks that promote car control and general race craft (albeit while putting their young lives in as much peril as the pros).
Truly, there’s never been a better time to be a young woman who yearns to win the Daytona 500 and celebrate under confetti in Victory Lane. Sure, sponsorship dollars in Nascar have never been scarcer, but young talent comes cheap. The past three years alone have seen the retirements of Jeff Gordon, Dale Earnhardt Jr and Patrick among others, and that exodus in expertise has renewed the urgency to invest in young prospects – male and female – who show the greatest potential to become long-term replacements. Most entities go about this discretely. But Toyota, the Nascar manufacturer who might well be the most significant player in the driver development space, does not. At least not anymore.
Of the umpteen drivers that have passed through Toyota’s development program over the past decade or so, “we’ve probably tested 40 different females and are actively working with six to 10 consistently and are constantly looking for more. I don’t know that people believe that there are 40 females driving. There’s more than that,” says Jack Irving, the senior executive who oversees Toyota’s farm system.
Perhaps the most promising driver is 21-year-old Natalie Decker, who competes in the Automobile Racing Club of America series, a Nascar feeder circuit. She started off her first full Arca season with a bang by grabbing pole position in the season opener at Daytona and following that up with finishes in the top five and top 10. (As of this writing she is fourth in the rookie points race.) Interestingly, her quest to become the next Danica Patrick is a bit more personal than her peers. You see, Danica takes her middle name from Decker’s aunt Sue. She set up Danica’s parents, Bev and TJ, on their first date; they were all fixtures on the snowmobile racing scene. Decker’s parents, Chuck and Amy, still have skin in the game. They run a snowmobile track in northern Wisconsin that’s regarded as the Indianapolis Motor Speedway of snow cross tracks. It plays host to an ice-bound Indy 500 every January.
Decker started out on snowmobiles as a kid but what she really wanted to do was race on wheels. It took years of begging before Chuck finally gifted Natalie a go-kart for her ninth birthday. That’s when she told her dad, “I want to be in Nascar one day.”
Decker recalls that at one time in her career she felt like she had to conceal her identity. “I remember my first stock car race at 12 years old,” she says. “I didn’t want anyone to know that I was a girl or how young I was. We had qualifying right after the drivers meeting, so I went in all suited up – with my Hans device on, my helmet, my gloves, everything – so no one could see who I was!”
Before long, though, she distinguished herself in earnest – so much so that she’d even motivate her older cousins Paige and Claire to go racing. They showed promise, but ultimately didn’t stick with it; these days Paige is a school teacher, and Claire is a cop. Whatever racing ambitions they once had for themselves are all on Natalie now. “Once, when we were all racing on a team together, I was watching Claire in an interview,” Decker recalls. “I remember her saying she doesn’t care if she makes it in Nascar, or who makes it in racing, as long as one of the Deckers makes it.”
Natalie will certainly get a fair shot. Her Venturini team enjoys robust support from Toyota and is quite progressive in its operation style. In 1987 they famously won the Arca championship with an all-female pit crew. Then just last month Venturini set the motorsports world on its ear again after assigning Decker, 18-year-old Toni Breidinger and a 44-year-old Minnesota native named Leilani Münter to three of the four cars they entered into an Arca race in Chicago. The fact that they are women shouldn’t discourage would-be sponsors from investing in their futures, but it does. A male driver is a sure thing, but a woman? She’s a long shot – or so goes the logic.
Carl Ruedebusch is the rare racing patron who’s keen to think outside the box. In addition to being a longtime Decker family friend who has followed Natalie’s ascent up close, Ruedebusch also heads a venture capital firm, N29 Capital Partners. When she came to him for Arca financing two seasons ago, he didn’t see a woman looking for a handout; he saw an opportunity to get in with a promising start-up on the ground floor. “This investment model is no different than any other model,” Ruedebusch says. “I thought, if we tried it out with Natalie, because I know her, and it proved out, then I might look at it further into the racing industry.”
It’s an insurgent approach to sponsorship that could catch on in Nascar in a big way. It also fits with what we know about the potential impact gender equality can have on the overall bottom line. (The McKinsey Global Institute supposes that women could add as much as $28tn to the world economy if they could participate in the same way that men do.) Doubtless many will see the N29 logo on the hood of Decker’s Toyota as just another rolling billboard. But, really, it’s a harbinger. No, Nascar’s feminist movement hasn’t arrived hot on the heels of Danica Mania, but it’s gaining momentum – fast. “I think a female driver making it to trucks will happen in the next three years,” Irving says, “and a female driver who wins in trucks will get to [the Nascar Cup Series]. My hope is that by 10 years, you’ll have someone winning in Cup. With the number of young females that are racing right now, I would be really, really disappointed and shocked if one of them isn’t there and able to win within the next five to 10 years.”
