It'll be pretty obvious to anyone who watches the new "Danica" documentary that Danica Patrick madly and deeply loves her family, her dogs, her boyfriend, yoga, her woman cave, and her coffee-cup collection (especially the unicorn).
What's less clear from the 66-minute film _ which premieres at 8 p.m. ET Wednesday on the EPIX network _ is how she truly feels these days about being a race-car driver.
At different points, she voices frustration and/or irritation with other drivers, with fans, with internet trolls, with the media, with her cars, with the fact that she's held to a different standard in NASCAR because she's a woman.
And so it seems like a fair enough place to start: Does she still love her job?
"I love parts of it," Patrick said in a phone interview with the Observer Thursday. "I like the mental side of things. I like the challenge. I like setting a goal and achieving it _ so, lap times, position, finishing.
"But I've never been someone that wants to go hang out at the track and watch other cars go around, and I don't want to go drive someone else's car for a joyride. It's not for the joy of just driving. ... The point is to accomplish great results on the track. If I'm not gonna finish well, then it's not fun to me."
This, of course, is the perfect setup for those trolls, who will read those last two sentences and leap at the opportunity to point out her lack of great results on the track and her inability to finish well _ which the documentary spells out explicitly: Since 2012, in six seasons on NASCAR's top circuit, Patrick has seven Top-10 finishes, an average finish of 24th place, just one pole, and zero wins.
As "Danica" director Hannah Storm notes, though, you can't just base her merit on those statistics in a vacuum.
"The one thing that really gets lost and is underappreciated by a lot of people," Storm said, "is the positive impact she had both on IndyCar racing and NASCAR racing, in terms of drawing new fans into each of those racing disciplines, in terms of bringing money in, in terms of lifting the tide of both sports and the interest level, which translates into television dollars, which translates into merchandise, and people coming to the track.
"If you want to drill it down to the fact that she hasn't won a race (in NASCAR) and rip her for that, to me that's very small-minded. It's petty. And I think it stems from jealousy, insecurity, ignorance. ... She's clearly held to a different standard because she's a woman."
(Storm should know a little something about being a woman in a man's world, by the way: She helped pave the way for women in sports broadcasting as a host for shows on CNN and NBC in the 1990s.)
Or, if that argument isn't good enough for you, she points to a sound bite of Patrick's from the film: "If you don't think I can drive, good God, I feel bad for the rest of the half of the field that I beat every weekend. What do you have to say about them?"
