Danica Patrick shines in stock-car debut, finishes 6th at Daytona

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IndyCar star Danica Patrick made an impressive stock-car racing debut Saturday, bouncing back from a collision and spin that put her deep in the field to finish sixth in an ARCA Series race at Daytona International Speedway.

‘I can’t wait to do it again,’ Patrick said. ‘I just wanted to be smart, make it to the end and I wanted to learn something in this race.’

ARCA is a developmental stock-car racing series that’s much smaller than NASCAR, and the 80-lap race essentially was a practice round for Patrick before she immediately jumps to NASCAR’s second-level Nationwide Series either next weekend at Daytona or Feb. 20 at Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, Calif.

Patrick, who shot to fame driving Indy 500-style cars, avoided several multi-car crashes in the race and, for the first half of the event, avoided serious trouble.

Just past the halfway point, her No. 7 Chevrolet scraped the side of Nelson Piquet Jr.’s Toyota, sending Patrick’s car into a spin on the high-banked, 2.5-mile Daytona speedway. She deftly controlled her car to avoid hitting the outside wall but the incident dropped her to 24th in the 43-car field.

But Patrick -- who drove a car prepared by JR Motorsports, a team co-owned by NASCAR star Dale Earnhardt Jr. -- stormed back through the field and challenged for a top-five finish in the closing laps. Bobby Gerhart won the race and Mark Thompson was second.

‘It was a lot of fun,’ Patrick said. ‘I bumped from the side, I bumped from the front, I got bumped from the back and I learned a lot and I had so much fun in a race car today.’

--Jim Peltz, reporting from Daytona Beach, Fla.