Five Things The 2016 NASCAR Season Taught All Of Us

No. 5 – Danica Patrick Is Who We Thought She Was

The Danica Patrick experiment is finally over in NASCAR.

No, she isn’t leaving the sport or moving to a new team. However, 2016 was the season that the sport and the mainstream attention seemed to finally move off of her. In previous seasons Patrick was in the public eye because of her gender, what she was trying to do in a male-dominated sport and of course her marketability.

While the results were not there folks that were pro-Danica (myself included) scolded the anti-Danica crowd and encouraged them to give her more time. The Danica-supporters believed that within a few seasons she would be running inside of the top-20 consistently and contending for top-10 finishes at certain tracks.

Heading into 2017 reality has finally bubbled to the surface and the truth is that Danica is exactly what we thought she was, an average driver at best. Now this isn’t a dig at her or the impact that she has made in NASCAR, it is just simply the truth. Most weeks she will run somewhere between 18th and 25th, she will have a couple of top-10 runs a season and she might lead a handful of laps. Maybe she will win once before her career ends but it’s highly unlikely that she will win twice and at the end of the day that’s okay.

On any given Sunday there are only about 12 drivers on the track with a legitimate chance of winning. That means there are 28 drivers out there that most likely won’t win, she is simply one of those 28 and now it seems that everyone has accepted that.