Friday, May 27, 2005 | 9:40 a.m.
Ron Kantowski is a Las Vegas Sun sports writer. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4088.
If you think grumpy old A.J. Foyt made a spectacle of himself by hurling a laptop computer down the pit lane when his car ran out of fuel a couple of years back, how do you think he'll react if Danica Patrick -- a woman of all things -- wins Sunday's Indianapolis 500?
It just might happen.
But it probably won't.
And, no matter what ol' A.J. might think (actually, what little he has had to say about Patrick has been positive), if she doesn't win it will have nothing to do with her being a woman.
It's just that with the exception of the guys who drive for Roger Penske (whose cars have won the most famous auto race in the world 13 times), the odds are stacked against any driver in the race, regardless of their sex, talent, the team for which they drive or the language they speak. Although it seems to help if you speak Portuguese, like all those fast Brazilians at the front of the field.
There are 33 starters at Indy, but only one winner. Unless you happen to be David Hasselhoff driving Kit or Dean Jones driving Herbie the Love Bug, those are long odds to overcome. And the gap between the Rockerfellers and the Cleavers -- you may know them as the Haves and Have-Nots -- seems to be shrinking at Indy.
The team for which Patrick drives, Rahal-Letterman (as in Bobby, the 1986 Indy winner, and David, the late night talk show host) is one of the best. One of their drivers, Buddy Rice, won last year. Patrick will line up fourth, which means she should be out of harm's way at the chaotic start of the race, which often resembles the Spaghetti Bowl at 4 p.m. on a Friday.
But even the best cars can blow an engine or get stuck in gear.
The point is at Indy, danger or misfortune lurks around every corner, and during the race, there are 800 corners around which to lurk. The Boston Strangler would have loved the Indy 500.
But let's say Dame Fortune plays favorites and guides Patrick around all of those relatives of Foyt and the other wankers, as the Brits like to say, puttering around at the back of the pack.
Then there's the matter of Patrick overcoming her own inexperience.
Rahal made sure she had the proper instruction in the various developmental series before fitting her for a seat in the really fast cars, but she's just 23. A rookie. Rookies don't win the Indy 500, unless they are interlopers from some other series such as Formula One's Graham Hill (1966) or CART's Juan Montoya (2000).
Those guys had hundreds of major league races under their belts before conquering Indy. Patrick has a grand total of four.
So far, she has run only four laps that count at Indy, and she made a big mistake on one of them. On the first of her four qualifying laps, she came into Turn 1 hotter than Paris Hilton in that Carl Jr.'s ad and nearly crashed, which cost her the coveted pole position. But a lesser driver might have wound up in the parking lot of the Steak 'n' Shake out on 16th Street between Turns 1 and 2.
That Patrick was able to keep her car off the wall and then gather her wits to put three blistering laps back-to-back shows she's no Ordinary Jane behind the wheel.
Three women have driven at Indy before her. But the first and second, Janet Guthrie and Lyn St. James, were in the twilight of their careers and drove for Dick Simon, whose cars were so slow that a couple of guys in Indy wrote a sad country song about drawing them in the office pool every year. More recently, Sarah Fisher competed in five 500s, but Guthrie's ninth-place finish in 1978 is still best among the women.
If Patrick can stay out of trouble, she should finish higher than that. But in that I've seen some pretty talented and experienced drivers chase the 500 for years and look like Capt. Ahab doing it (Michael Andretti, for instance, was 0-14, Lloyd Ruby 0-for-18 and the great Mario Andretti just 1-for-29), Patrick may have to put a few more miles under her belt before sipping the milk in victory lane.
I truly believe her day is coming. I just don't think it's going to be Sunday.
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