Six minutes into Wednesday’s first NASCAR Sprint Cup Series practice session, Danica Patrick’s No. 10 Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet sat immobile on the infield grass.
Patrick’s car had turned and smacked the outside wall when Denny Hamlin steered to the middle in a three-wide draft, and her team immediately rolled out a backup car to use in Thursday night’s Budweiser Duel at Daytona 150-mile qualifying races (7 p.m. on FOX Sports 1).
“I was just riding along and it turned, so it’s the nature of pack racing, and that’s what makes it challenging, too,” Patrick said after exiting the infield care center. “Sometimes there’s not much you can do about it. I could have collected more people, and it wouldn’t have been anything that they were a part of.
“But that’s just group racing at Daytona. That’s the gamble that we all face. That’s what makes it exciting and very frustrating. So, we knew we were going to have to run hard in the Duels no matter what, and that just doesn’t change.”
Hamlin said he was trying to gauge how his car would react in a three-wide situation.
“People say in practice that you can’t make aggressive moves, but we also have to put ourselves in decent positions where we’re going to have to figure out what our car is doing,” Hamlin said.
“I went through the middle and it was really wide – it just closed as soon as I had already got inside of her (Patrick) and the lane closed. It knocked me into the 13 (Casey Mears) and we had some attrition after that.”
The damage to Hamlin’s car wasn’t serious enough to scrap the primary car, but Michael Annett, who also was collected in the crash, will go to a backup No. 46 Chevrolet for the Duels.
Source: Reid Spencer / NASCAR Wire Service
