After Kimi Raikkonen makes headline in last event Charlotte Nationwide, now is time to Danica to show up. Danica Patrick
is return to NASCAR this weekend, for a race at Chicagoland Speedway
that's part of her limited schedule on the Nationwide Series. It's been
11 weeks since we last saw Patrick in a stock car, at Bristol in March.
It will be another month before we see her again, on the high banks at
Daytona. With much of her IndyCar schedule clustered in the spring and
summer, it will be November before we see her run consecutive Nationwide
events in JR Motorsports' No. 7 car.
Which is too bad, because as anyone who witnessed Patrick's historic fourth-place run at Las Vegas on March 5 can attest, she's clearly figuring this stock-car thing out. No question, she still has her hiccups -- her first start at Bristol, for example, which proved a rude awakening -- but Vegas was no fluke. Her lap-after-lap duel with Daytona 500 champion Trevor Bayne for position inside the top 10 offered further hints of her potential, at least on the kind of intermediate tracks that dominate the circuit. Nearly three months later, we finally get to see if she can build on it.
NASCAR officials announced Tuesday a revision in qualifying procedures for the Nationwide and Truck Series, beginning this weekend.
Instead of separating the qualifying order between teams locked in and those which must qualify on speed, the entire field will be sorted based on practice speeds, from slowest to fastest. Starting this season, locked-in teams were set first in the qualifying order, in the inverse order of their best practice speed, followed by those needing to qualify on time. Before 2011, the qualifying order had been set by a random draw.
According to the NASCAR release, the rules change hopes to "level competition between the slowest and fastest cars and provide more of compelling qualifying session for the fans".
