This story appears in the Septemper 22, 2013 issue of Forbes. Subscribe
Danica Patrick greets me inside her well-appointed motor coach on a rainy Friday at Pennsylvania's Pocono Speedway, a.k.a. the Tricky Triangle. The bus is where she spends the bulk of her time thanks to the ten-month-long Nascar season. With her shoes off, Patrick appears startlingly small. She clocks in at 5-foot-1 and just 100 pounds. Then she shakes your hand with a bone-crushing grip, which is able to steer a 3,400-pound car for four hours every Sunday at speeds reaching 200 mph. The grip conveys the message: Don't let my size or gender fool you.
Nascar kicks off its version of playoffs this month: the Chase for the Sprint Cup. The victoryless Patrick, 31, didn't qualify for it (only the top 12 drivers do). But in her first full year on Nascar's premier circuit--she drove IndyCar for seven years and spent another three toiling in Nascar's minor league--Patrick is already one of the biggest stars in motorsports. Her 12 Super Bowl commercials are a celebrity record. Patrick was the most-searched athlete, male or female, on Yahoo in 2011 and ranked fourth last year. She attended the White House Easter Egg Roll in April and chatted up President Obama.
Patrick is only one of 43 drivers lined up to race each Sunday, but on her slender back rest hopes for another growth spurt for Nascar, which exploded in the 1990s. Average race attendance of 98,000 fans last year was the lowest attendance since Nascar started announcing attendance figures in 2003 (the peak was 2005 with 130,000 fans per race). TV viewership per race peaked at 8.5 million in 2005, according to Nielsen, but outside of 2011 it has slid every year since and hit 5.8 million last year. Revenues at Nascar's two main publicly traded track operators, International Speedway Corp. and Speedway Motorsports, are down 22% and 20% since 2008.
Nascar is a culture as much as a sport, and it is one built on personalities like Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr. Fans are loyal to their preferred drivers and the sponsors of those cars. Families spend long weekends at tracks camping, tailgating and cheering on the No. 88 Chevy or No. 99 Ford while snapping up overpriced merchandise. But fans have tuned out Nascar in recent years, and one of the chief complaints is the drivers and cars are of the cookie-cutter variety and indistinguishable.
Not Danica. In addition to being the first woman to race full-time on Nascar's senior circuit in 36 years (the equally winless Janet Guthrie started 33 races in the 1970s), she is as polarizing as they come. "She is like the New York Yankees of the motorsports world," says Zak Brown, founder of motorsports agency Just Marketing International. Her positive Q Score, which indicates a connection with fans, is 22% compared with 14% for the average driver. Her negative score is 19% (down from 23% last year) versus 17% for the typical racer. It is a vocal opposition that lights up Nascar message boards: "Danica is a joke," and "Danica Patrick is so overrated," and "She's a useless race car driver."
Motorsports analyst Kyle Petty, son of Nascar legend Richard Petty, blasted Patrick on cable TV's Race Hub program in June. "She is not a race car driver," said Petty, who labeled Patrick a "marketing machine."
Haters aside, by some measures, Patrick has raced very well. Her average start position this season has been 31; her average finish 26--that 5-position gain is the best in the sport. She won in 2008 at the Indy Japan 300, and she is only one of 13 drivers, male or female, to lead both the Indy 500 and Daytona 500. "I feel like I need to win to be a success in Nascar, and I do believe eventually that will happen," says Patrick. "The biggest pressures are my own expectation levels and wanting to do well for my team."
Yet polarizing and recognizable (her awareness level is more than double that of the typical driver and on par with Derek Jeter and Michael Phelps) can be a powerful combination. Patrick pulled in an estimated $15 million over the last 12 months from prize money, licensing, endorsements and her driver salary (see other top-paid drivers in motorsports here). All the fuss is over a driver sitting 27th--about middle of the pack--in Nascar's yearlong standings.
"She is the complete package," says Sharon Byers, head of sports marketing for Coca-Cola, who inked Patrick to shill for its Coke Zero brand last year. Coke is one of Patrick's 15 personal sponsors, including Chevrolet, Nationwide Insurance and watchmaker Tissot. It is the biggest endorsement portfolio in the sport--both in terms of cash and number of deals.
Her most important partner is GoDaddy, which put Patrick on the map with its racy Super Bowl commercials and is the primary sponsor of her car at a cost in the $20-million-a-year range. Market share for the Web domain registrar jumped from 32% to 50% since it signed Patrick in 2006, and the company credits Patrick for part of the growth. "She is so aspirational because she is a woman competing in a man's world," says Barb Rechterman, chief marketing officer at GoDaddy.
Nascar suffered more than any other major sport during the economic downturn. Cash-strapped fans skipped Nascar "vacations," three- or four-day affairs, typically involving hundreds of miles of travel. Ninety-dollar miniature replica cars and $100 tickets were scrapped in favor of mortgage payments and grocery money. Companies slashed marketing budgets, and fewer sponsors wanted to take on the $20 million-plus activation costs involved in backing a car for a full season.
Nascar recently received good news on the TV front thanks to the insatiable appetite for live sports programming in a Netflix and Hulu age. It inked a ten-year, $3.8 billion contract extension with Fox in two parts in October and August for the first 16 Sprint Cup and 14 Nationwide races of the season. Nascar nabbed a ten-year, $4.4 billion pact in July from NBC for the final 20 Sprint Cup and 19 Nationwide races each year. The combined $8.2 billion marks a 37% bump over the prior deals with Fox, ESPN and Turner. Despite the TV audience declines, Nascar still has the second-highest ratings nationally of any sport behind the NFL. That's with Patrick losing; if she can punch it and start winning, those ratings will skyrocket.
The Danica Effect was on full display in February at the Daytona 500, where she became the first woman to qualify for the pole position at a Sprint Cup race and finished eighth (her best finish of the year). Ratings for the race improved 24% versus 2012's edition, fueled by Danica-mania and the introduction of the new Gen 6 car--an initiative to make Nascar vehicles more closely resemble the models coming off the assembly line. In the week leading up to the race, her merchandise was the top seller on online retailer Fanatics.com--a perch typically reserved for Earnhardt. Overall sales of Patrick gear were up 350% compared with those around last year's Daytona 500, her maiden outing.
The recently divorced Patrick has also caused a stir by dating fellow Rookie-of-the-Year candidate Ricky Stenhouse Jr. She offers bluntly: "Those rules in offices about dating people you work with suck. They suck." The two are often the only rookies to qualify for Cup races and are locked in a three-way battle--with Timmy Hill--for Rookie of the Year honors. Stenhouse triggered a wreck at the Coca-Cola 600 in Charlotte in May when he nudged Patrick into another car. "Was I mad? Yeah, he knocked me out of the race," she says.
Patrick's racing career started in Roscoe, Ill., where she tagged along to the recreational snowmobile races of her father, T.J. He introduced 10-year-old Danica and younger sister Brooke to go-kart racing. Danica quickly found success. "It was not about being the fastest girl," she recalls. "It was about being the faster driver, and with my dad it was about being the fastest driver by a lot."
The marketing of Danica started early, as her father had "hero" cards made with her photo and T-shirts printed to promote Danica and help defray some of the racing costs. T.J. called newspapers each week to detail his daughter's performance. The novelty of a girl racing caught the attention of ABC and MTV, which in 1997 ran segments on the then 15-year-old Patrick.
It also attracted the eye of oil heir John Mecom Jr., who hired her to race in the U.K.'s Formula Ford circuit, which is an entry level series for Formula One and IndyCar drivers. She spent the next three years in England (getting her GED while in the U.K.). It was an invaluable training tool. She returned to the U.S in late 2001 and landed a job racing for what became Rahal Letterman Racing--the IndyCar team owned by race legend Bobby Rahal and talk-show host David Letterman. Patrick raced in the IndyCar minor leagues before graduating to the main circuit in 2005.
She quickly became a crossover star as the attractive female race car driver. She appeared in a Jay Z video and guest cohosted The View. Her impact on IndyCar was massive. Her merchandise at the Indy 500 in 2005 outsold the other 32 other drivers combined. When she left IndyCar for good after the 2011 season, TV ratings for races on the NBC Sports Network dropped 27%.
Patrick's introduction to Nascar came in 2010 when she started driving part-time for Earnhardt's Nationwide team, JR Motorsports. Tony Stewart, who also made the move as a driver from IndyCar to Nascar in 1999, signed Patrick to race part-time for the Cup team he co-owns, Stewart-Haas Racing, starting in 2012. "I was just beginning to not have as much fun in IndyCar," says Patrick.
Nascar and IndyCar are the dominate motorsport leagues in the U.S. (Formula 1 rules the rest of the world), but they differ wildly in terms of the cars and fan base. Nascar rides are similar to conventional cars and weigh twice as much as the no-roof, open-wheel IndyCars. Nascar is a contact sport versus IndyCar where cars spin out and crash with the slightest impact. Nascar offers dramatically more exposure for Patrick's sponsors. IndyCar races were seen by 1.2 million fans on average last year over 15 weekends. Nascar's typical race audience is five times that, and the season stretches 38 weeks. Patrick retains three personal sponsors from her IndyCar days and has picked up a dozen new ones since joining Nascar.
Like all Nascar rookies, Patrick faces an uphill battle to succeed. Her on-track results have been disappointing since Daytona with only three other top 15 finishes, but the move from IndyCar to Nascar typically involves a massive learning curve. Only one rookie--Joey Logano--has won a premier circuit event in the last five years. On average, rookies finished in 31st place in the year-end standings since 2008.
Patrick does have one advantage as a woman in a man's sport. All Cup cars must weigh no more than 3,400 pounds, including the driver. Patrick's small frame allows her crew to distribute the added weight better to help the car run faster. The advantage is not enough to inspire a run on jockey-size drivers, but it helps to not have 200 pounds of man-meat parked in the seat on the left side of the car.
In the short run Patrick can maintain her popularity without winning. She only needs to look across the track to a relevant comparison in Earnhardt. He has been voted Nascar's most popular driver ten years running and is the sport's top earner at $26 million annually despite only two wins the past seven years.
In the long run she must start winning. JMI's Brown thinks Danica has three years before sponsors and fans start to reconsider their investment if Patrick is not competitive. She has the tools to succeed with a well-funded team in Stewart-Haas. Her racing sensei, Tony Gibson, was the car chief for the title teams of Alan Kulwicki and Jeff Gordon. "It only took me two races to realize she is in it to win it and she is going to go a long way in this sport," says Gibson. "A year from now she is going to turn some heads."
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