I’m just slumming it on the sports blog until they make me full-time over at Gamma Squad, so I’m excited to announce that NASCAR beauty Danica Patrick will be appearing alongside Sonic the Hedgehog in the upcoming multi-platform kart racer Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed. Wait, no I’m not, I think it’s the stupidest f**king news I’ve ever heard.

But no, seriously, Danica will be a playable character in a game where a hedgehog who can run super fast decides to race people in a car (?) that turns into a boat and then into an airplane. You know, instead of running. She’ll appear alongside such luminaries as Amigo the Maracas Monkey, the taxi driver from Crazy Taxi and “Gilius Thunderhead”, which I’m guessing was Danica’s name before she became a driver.

Quick, try to decide which of these statements was most written by a public relations team!

“It’s a very exciting experience since I’ll be sharing the screen with such an iconic character,” said Danica Patrick. “I cannot wait for gamers to jump into my customized, transformable vehicles and give Sonic a run for his rings this holiday season!”

“Danica Patrick is one of the most popular athletes in the world and her accomplishments both on and off the track make her the perfect partner for Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed,” said Masanao Maeda, President and COO, SEGA of America.

I can’t decide which is harder to believe, the fact that the Japanese COO of SEGA thought “that lady racecar driver people know” would be perfect for his monkeys in hovercrafts garbageware game or that Danica Patrick said the phrase “jump into my customized, transformable vehicles and give Sonic a run for his rings this holiday season” in real life. The full picture of Danica on the Sonic stock car she’ll be driving during the O’Reilly Auto Parts Challenge on November 3 at the Texas Motor Speedway is below, because video games!

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Jeffrey Earnhardt, grandson of “The Intimidator” Dale Earnhardt and nephew of “Not As Intimidating But He’s In Jeans Commercials” Dale Earnhardt, Jr., races on the Rolex Sports Car Series and the NASCAR Nationwide Series. Starting this Tuesday, he’s pulling a Bo Jackson and becoming a two-sport athlete: Jeffrey (or as I like to call him, “Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.*”) is fighting at Fight Lab 25 in Charlotte, N.C. as an amateur, going up against bantamweight competitor Chris Faison.

We’re about to have an Earnhardt in MMA. Why, you ask? Because people don’t think driving is a real sport. Jeff is hoping to validate the athleticism of stock car racing by being athletic in a way that has nothing to do with stock cars or racing. No, really!

“A lot of people don’t see race car athletes as true athletes … They don’t think we’re capable of doing anything other than sitting in a car and driving in a circle. A lot of people don’t understand the reality of it. This is an opportunity to prove to people that race car drivers are athletes. It’s a lot harder than people realize. Hopefully this MMA fight will help people realize that, and that we can hold our own as athletes.” (via MMA Fighting)

I’m sure there are accountants out there that do CrossFit and could rip my arms off, that doesn’t mean accounting is a sport. And hey, just because fighting is a sport doesn’t mean everyone who does it is an athlete. I’m a blogger and I could probably knock out Bob Sapp.

Regardless of his intent, I’ll be watching. I’m pretty excited for a guy who smiles like that to enter the world of punching.

This year’s Daytona 500 was undoubtedly one of the strangest in recent memory. For starters, there was that whole 36-hour delay and holding it on a Monday night for the first time in history. But between the multiple crashes in Saturday’s Nationwide race, the crash in the opening of the 500 and Juan Pablo Montoya inexplicably flying into a track dryer/jet engine, the entire weekend felt like one really bad Days of Thunder remake. Except this one didn’t feature Nicole Kidman screaming, “LET ME OUT OF THE CAH, COLE!” or end with Tom Cruise running like a sissy.

But it did end with people wondering, WTF is up with Danica Patrick? The not-really-first lady of racing wrecked three times during the 500 weekend events, including both the Nationwide and main races. So what the hell happened, DP?

“I just wish the beginning of the race could have been a nice single-file line like it was when I got back out there, but it wasn’t,” Patrick said. “And honestly, that’s my lesson to learn, maybe. Write off that first little bit if you’re not up front.”

“I would have loved to have run up there. I would have loved to have got the experience when you actually were racing for positions as opposed to just feeling it out,” Patrick said. “But I truly believe everything happens for a reason.”(Via CBS Sports)

That’s a good outlook, I suppose, but she crashed three times. This was supposed to be her big chance – her first Daytona 500 – to hang with the boys and take one giant leap forward for women in racing. But if everything happens for a reason, I think someone is trying to tell Danica to tighten her HANS device, because it’s gonna be a long year.

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Whenever I get low on The American Spirit, I can always count on Fark and the fine men and other men of ESPN NASCAR to dip said spirit in flour, deep fry it and shove it down my throat. In fact, that’s happened so many times now that my ass has expanded exponentially, and, having lost the ability to stand, I now require a broader seat upon which to rest my shame.

Good news, everyone!

Dover International Speedway in Delaware is hoping to make race fans’ experience a little more comfortable by widening seats in the track’s outdoor grandstands.

The speedway announced Thursday that the process of increasing seats from 18 inches to 22 inches will start next year and will be complete by 2014.

Denis McGlynn, president and CEO of Dover Motorsports, says the widening comes in response to fans’ suggestions. The change will reduce the capacity of the speedway from 140,000 to 113,000.

I’m guessing there aren’t a lot of vegan options at Dover International Speedway.

Before this post becomes too much of a fat wank, there are other explanations … namely, a 30,000 seat downshift helps compensate for declining attendance figures and make the track look more full, and the reality that even slimmer fans could use more leg room, especially when they’re wearing scanners or Jncos or enormous belt buckles. I just love that they’re widening the seats because of “fans’ suggestions”, like some 600 pound lady spent 40 minutes writing “wider seats” on a comment card before passing out and having the wind pick it up and carry it to the suggestion box. If I went to the speedway my suggestions would be “obstacles” and possibly “make it so the cars shoot turtle shells at each other”.

In today’s hottest “NASCAR driver might not have a great perspective on the world” news, driver Kasey Kahne offended every single human woman on Twitter when he saw a lady breastfeeding her child at the grocery store and jumped on the Internet to complain about it.

At first you’re like, “maybe he just turned out of the dog food aisle and suddenly there was a tit”, which is reasonably jarring.

But then … no, he was disgusted by it. He was disgusted by what he saw your body doing.

Yeah, you stupid bitch, how is he supposed to buy saltines and Mountain Dew and whatever else it is NASCAR drivers eat now? Unfortunately the expository tweet between the two was deleted, but if you need to know exactly what transported him from Kroger to Barf’s Burgers:

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I thought he was just a cereal box model, but apparently Jeff Gordon is a champion race car driver and B-Boy.

The breaking of dance occurred during the NASCAR “After the Lap” event in Las Vegas, a championship banquet referred to by the Las Vegas Sun as a “press conference on steroids” that plays out like the last 30 minutes of any Blue Collar Comedy Tour stop, right down having Bill Engvall sit there squinting and laughing while people around him try to be entertaining. The skinny (and white) from SB Nation:

Gordon said he started break-dancing in middle school because that’s what all the cool kids did. In fact, the four-time NASCAR champ said he’d sneak into the bathroom and break-dance every morning before school, because they weren’t allowed to dance in the hallways.

You can check out video of the hip-hoppery after the jump, but be aware that at no point during the clip does he accidentally kick Bill Engvall in the face.

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