NASCAR: Should Danica Patrick be a Hall of Famer?
By Asher Fair
Rebuttal
As with every argument, there are two sides to a story, and here is the logic behind actually inducting Danica Patrick into the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
In her first race as a Stewart-Haas Racing driver in 2013, the race that opened up her career as a full-time Cup Series driver, she took the pole position, and she did so at NASCAR’s greatest race, the Daytona 500. In doing so, she became the first woman to ever sit on the pole position for a Cup Series race , a major accomplishment in a historically and currently male-dominated sport.
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While she did only manage to lead five of the race’s 200 laps, she still finished in 8th place and opened up the season in 7th place in the championship standings because of it.
And because of her appeal to the public, ratings for that race were up by 30% from the 2012 edition of the “Great American Race”. They ended up being the best ratings for the Daytona 500 since the 2006 race. Her performance didn’t disappoint, either.
Over the course of Patrick’s Cup Series career, NASCAR as a whole has become less and less popular. Yet many people will tell you that she has, in a way, “saved the sport”, as the fans she has brought and continues to bring make her a driver with one of the sport’s top driver fanbases during a period when NASCAR needed fans the most.
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