If Danica Patrick can make a successful swing from open wheel to stock car racing, our hats should go off to her … but putting her forth as the most important person in NASCAR defies intelligence, considering she hasn’t competed in one actual race, and only one single road racer –Juan Pablo Montoya–has shown any success at the switch.

 

It’s kind of tough for the true, blue fan when most what he (or she) gets on NASCAR involves football players trying to sound as if they know something about it. These are mostly chitchat lead-ins to promos for the Daytona 500, sort of similar to the sweet nothings on TV news when they’re about to go to breaks.

The highlight - or, more appropriate, lowlight - of the TV offseason so far has been Cris Collinsworth being conned by Phil Simms on Showtime’s "Inside the NFL."

Collinsworth apparently wanted to portray himself as a NASCAR fan so he asked Simms for some help. Simms told Collinsworth that, contrary to popular belief, the all-time leader in NASCAR victories was Cale Yarborough, not Richard Petty. Collinsworth, a Floridian, bragged that, being a Southerner, he knew NASCAR. When James Brown asked him the question, Collinsworth didn’t just say the wrong answer, he practically preached it. The ex-Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver might have suspected he’d been had when Warren Sapp fell completely out of his chair laughing.

Oh, yeah. NASCAR. They like it when we act like we know something about it.

As Tom T. Hall once wrote in a song, "They might pat your fanny, and say you’re a dandy, but they still don’t like pickin’ on network TV."

NASCAR, either, deep down.

But it’s big now. There’s money to be made. Just act like you know what you’re doing, and maybe, just maybe, you’ll wind up getting some of it.

Lots of times, it seems as if my views are skewed, not by lack of knowledge, but by knowledge. The table seems set by those who don’t know much.

This sport has so many feeding frenzies these days, and in the long run, most of them don’t amount to a hill of beans.

Too many stories dissipate when the actual subjects climb into actual race cars and actually try to race.

You remember the greatest rookie class in NASCAR history, don’t you? What? You don’t remember 2008, when Dario Franchitti, Jacques Villeneuve, Sam Hornish Jr. and an international cast that would’ve impressed Cecil B. DeMille all entered NASCAR.

The Raybestos Rookie of the Year wound up being … Regan Smith.

Now there’s Danica Patrick, who, at this moment (and mark it down), seems to be the most important person in NASCAR. This despite the fact that she hasn’t competed in even one actual race and that there aren’t currently any Sprint Cup races in her defined future.

She may make it big, just like some people thought Jimmie Johnson might make it big back when the century turned.

The odds do not favor her, though. This is a difficult transition she is trying to make, one that only one person, Juan Pablo Montoya, has ever pulled off.

Forget A.J. Foyt and Mario Andretti. Forget Tony Stewart. They all cut their teeth in sprints and midgets, and that’s a fine preparation for stock cars, particularly when the sprint cars don’t have wings. (Uh, like stock cars now do.)

For some reason, when a driver’s foundation is laid on road courses, he has a difficult time adjusting the seats of his (or her) pants driving unwieldy stock cars on ovals.

Marcos Ambrose, who might wind up being a success story second only to Montoya, says it’s because the cars are always "loaded." No, they’re not drunk.

Ambrose’s point is that, for the majority of a lap at most oval tracks, the stock car is on the edge of adhesion. It’s on the verge of spinning out. This is true a much smaller percentage of the time on road courses.

No disrespect is meant. Road racing is really difficult. Road racers are really talented. Put Joe Nemechek in the Grand Prix of Monaco, and he’s in a world of hurt, too.

And here’s something Jeff Gordon said to me years ago: "If you’re going to make a change like that, you’d better make it while you’re awfully young."

What doesn’t matter is that Patrick is a woman. There’s no reason a woman can’t excel, which she has already proved in Indy cars.

In every sense of the term, though, Patrick is a long shot. If she pulls it off, she’s going to deserve every bit of the credit she gets.

Not now, though. She’s still got a mountain in front of her to climb. And before she becomes Sir Edmund Hilary, she’d better hope she can find a Tenzing Norgay.

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