Danica Patrick made her NASCAR debut yesterday in Daytona, and things didn’t go as well as she’d hoped.  Not only did she not win, she didn’t even finish.  She tried to work her way out of a 12-car orgy and ended up crashing herself.

Patrick finished sixth in last week’s ARCA event at Daytona, and felt comfortable enough to move her NASCAR debut up a week to the Nationwide opener. The IndyCar star went into Saturday’s start saying her main goals were finishing the race, staying out of trouble and learning as much as she can.–Fox Sports

Danica spent much of the race outside the top 20 and then the top 30, but to be fair, someone has to be last so it may as well be her.  Both Dale Earnhardt Jr. and the race’s winner Tony Stewart came to Patrick’s defense, citing the uniqueness of the Daytona event in general and the fact that she didn’t crap out sooner as reasons she’s legit.

“We’ll go to these other tracks where she’ll literally be driving the car, it’ll be handling good or bad,” Earnhardt said. “Then people can start forming their opinions on what kind of learning curve she has. But I feel pretty confident. She’s been in a tough situation with the media and the pressure and the attention, I couldn’t have done it.”–Fox Sports

All of the hype is certainly good for business.  There are plenty of sadists in this world that will tune in just to see if she fails.  However, she’s hot, young trim behind a powerful machine in a man’s sport–if she starts winning she’s going to be like a unicorn.  As long as she never lets herself go, anyway.  Then she’d be completely useless.

In a move that I assume is only news because it means women are allowed to drive in the Confederacy, Indy Racer Danica Patrick had her first stock car draft practice yesterday.  BEEP BEEP!

She and 59 other drivers did stuff like drive next to each other, drive in front of each other, drive in packs, turn left, turn left again, and probably drink beer and shoot empty oil cans in the pit area with their rifles.

Crew Chief Tony Eury Jr. had this to say about her first day:

She’s doing really good. Drafting is not something that you learn overnight. She has done really good learning how to stay in a pack, learning what the car does in different aero situations. We’re pretty pleased. I think I need a little more speed in the car just in single car runs. Overall, it has been a good successful day. We’ll come back here tomorrow and let her draft a little bit more and I think we will be game on.–Foxsports.com

This morning she gets to drive fast and turn left all by herself, followed by more practice in which they go over things like changing lanes and not running into other cars.  It’s really nice to see that she’s “done really good” in a move to less complicated driving.  She gives me hope for the day when I want to regress to not being able to tie my own shoes and drooling on myself.

Noted bloggerati Unsilent Majority and Sarah Schorno spent a weekend in Vegas to check out the new Lagasse’s Stadium. It’s a new restaurant and bar nestled squarely into the Palazzo hotel lobby, promising entertainment and food and over 100 HDTVs in case you hate everyone at your table. UM and Sarah wrote something up for their trip about the newest venture from famed TV chef Emeril Lagasse; their words are after the jump.

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Racing sensation and autographer of male breasts Danica Patrick was asked in SI this week if she would have taken any performance-enhancing drugs, provided that they would have helped her win the Indianapolis 500 and she would have avoided detection:

Danica, who finished third at Indy last month, said, “Well, then it’s not cheating, is it? If nobody finds out?

“Yeah,” she added. “It would be like finding a gray area. In motorsports, we work in gray areas a lot. You’re trying to find where the holes are in the rule book.”

That remark got her in trouble with the US Anti-Doping Agency, whose ass it is in your best interest to kiss when they operate with Gestapo-esque tactics with seemingly no oversight or appeal methodology. But none of that matters to columnists like John Smallwood of the Philadelphia Enquirer, who couldn’t play the Think Of The Children card fast enough.

[T]he biggest shame in kids thinking that they have to use illegal drugs to get ahead is that they see repeated examples of it working every day in the world of professional athletics.[...]

Rule books aren’t written in gray. The are written in crystal-clear black and white. Looking for loopholes and gray areas to bend, flex or stretch is called “cheating.”

I feel compelled to point out that Smallwood is African-American, but only because “Smallwood” is a hilarious surname for a black guy. But damn, son. This freaking country was founded on loopholes. And the great fallacy with the steroids witchhunt is that the only players that seem to be getting busted are the ones that piss off all the sportswriters. The testing process IS NOT black-and-white; nobody knows how it works, just as everybody knows that these tests are only catching the people stupid enough to get caught.

And the only reason kids turn to steroids is because kids are irrational and lazy. It’s the Contra Cheat Code for life. Pants down, shoot up, pants down, shoot up, left, right, left, right, B, A. Dirty lives, just like that. Alright, I’m off the soapbox now. Hey, what happened to all the soap that was in here? Read the rest of this entry »

I hate to sound like one of these East-Coast jagoffs that act like they’re too good for certain sporting events. But I really am having a hard time getting into this weekend’s Indy 500. I really don’t know any of the drivers except that one chick, and there’s talk of her going to NASCAR, anyway. Anyway, COED Magazine tries to capture the spirit of the thing with a gallery of racing-related ladies, I guess. Pretty sure these aren’t IRL gals, but when it comes to open-wheel racing and open bars and open-casket funerals, I’m not so picky.

Indy racer Danica Patrick is in the Swimsuit Issue for the second consecutive year, and this year’s spread is way way better than last year’s.  Last year she was crawling out of a firesuit on a beach and wearing a bland white bikini.  Now they’ve got her all glammed up, wearing a fancy bikini and high heels while she’s draped across a sports car.  Science says that high heels and fast cars make any photo shoot 50% sexier, and science is never wrong.  Science also says she could have gotten the extra 50% if she were pictured eating fruit provocatively and submerging herself in a tub of motor oil.  Eh, maybe next year.