Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Ahhhh!

It’s good to be Queen !

While several of NASCAR’s best and brightest were strutting their stuff in Mexico, where Kyle Busch won yet again in the Nationwide Series, stock car racing was being upstaged, for once, by the Indy cars.

It’s been awhile since that happened.

The embattled, but finally unified, Indy Racing League got a long awaited boost when Danica Patrick won for the first time. The first female Indy-car winner broke through in her 50th attempt.

NASCAR greatly benefited from the open-wheel split that lasted more than a decade. When it happened, in 1996, Indy cars were a potent, if already troubled, force in American motorsports. By the time the split finally ended this year, the long term decline in attendance and television ratings had relegated IRL and ChampCar alike into a once great, but trivialized, outpost of the sport.

So what happens next? Does Patrick’s victory spur a long term restoration or just a short term boost? How does it affect NASCAR? Does a rise in open-wheel interest create a fall for NASCAR? Or is the health of motorsports overall beneficial for all parties?

There is no Danica Patrick on the NASCAR horizon. Women have occasionally competed but without notable success. NASCAR diversity efforts have been focused on ethnicity, not gender, in part because the modest success stories have mostly involved men.

This week, Patrick will enjoy the kind of acclaim normally reserved for a Daytona 500 or Indy 500 victor. Her victory occurs at almost a perfect time, leading into the tradition-filled month of May at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Patrick was featured in a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue pictorial earlier this year. She is attractive, articulate and vitally concerned with her image. There won’t be any reluctance on her part to capitalize on the attention.

If there is to be some torrid battle for attention, NASCAR also brings considerable firepower to the front lines. The next five weeks feature races likely to create excitement: perilous Talladega, roughhousing Richmond, tradition-rich Darlington, and then the two contrasting races, the rock-’em, sock-’em Sprint All-Star Race and the prolonged Coca-Cola 600, at Lowe’s Motor Speedway. NASCAR’s longest race falls on the same day as the IRL’s most important, the Indianapolis 500. In recent years, television viewers have often preferred “the 600″ to “the 500.”

Tony Stewart is a two-time Cup champion, but he won the IRL title in 1997 and has twice competed in both Memorial Day weekend races on the same day. While Stewart’s commitment to NASCAR has grown over the years, his concern for the plight of Indy cars remains. If the IRL hadn’t declined, Stewart might have never left.

“I’m afraid, in all reality, it’s hard to get sponsorship over there, and I think that’s a big issue,” Stewart said recently. “I don’t think drivers are going to necessarily have the opportunities that they had when the IRL first started. It kind of weaned itself away from that, anyway, and it got to where just the financial side was too difficult. For (IRL) owners to get sponsors, too often they need a driver to come along and bring sponsorship dollars that give them an opportunity to get a ride.

“What the IRL was designed for in the first place was to get away from that and give opportunities to guys who didn’t have multimillion-dollar partners and sponsors to help out. I don’t know if it’s ever going to get to that stage again. That’s what the IRL was intended to do from the get-go, and it worked for a little while, but it still goes back to car owners having to rely on that sponsorship money to make it work.”

How does Patrick’s breakthrough affect the image of the IRL in the marketplace? It helps, but how much?

What makes this situation even testier is the fact that the economy is down a cylinder and struggling to find more horsepower. The economic engine drives race cars as much as the drivers. NASCAR attendance is down. Even a fan watching on TV can see it despite all the efforts by Fox and ESPN to shoot the action in a way that hides empty seats.

But, to borrow the lingo of journalists, only time will tell whether the Danica story “has legs.” The 26-year-old female driver is going to be “the rage.” What isn’t known yet is whether she is going to be a savior.

(AOL)