Danica Patrick Gets Wrecked, Denied Career-Best NASCAR Finish

Headed toward a career-best finish, Danica Patrick was running well enough to prove her doubters wrong as the laps wound down in the Nationwide Series race at Auto Club Speedway.

Patrick was just 10 laps away from recording her first top-20 finish in NASCAR and had a legitimate shot at a top-15 result. She ran well all day long, passed some good cars and showed she belonged on the track.

But she didn’t get the finish she wanted after late contact with James Buescher sent her crashing into the wall as she was running 17th, her rear tires getting airborne as her car whirled around on the Auto Club Speedway backstretch.

“What the hell happened there?” Patrick asked her team on the radio. “It was like there was room, then there wasn’t.”

After the race, she suggested Buescher intentionally wrecked her – and the replay seemed to support her argument. Buescher said it was “definitely not intentional.”

First, here’s Danica’s side:

I drifted up and kind of got into him on the lap before and I didn’t mean to. I thought I was clear. It’s my fault. My spotter was helping me out, but I just for some reason thought that the car that went in front of me was clear so I accidentally got into him.

On that lap (when the wreck happened), he was staying outside and I got really close and I was sliding up. We are all pushing really hard out there because it is the last few laps and it gets so much more racy. I watched the replay, I came off of him and we were going for a bit and it looked like he turned me.

I guess that’s the way it goes. As I’ve been saying the fun part about these things is I’ve got fenders and so I guess I’m learning how to use them.

Now here’s what Buescher said:

Patrick said she was frustrated to finish 30th on a day that seemed so promising, but was proud she was “so much more racy.”

“I was passing good cars, cars that I thought were going to take a long time to learn how to get, and get as good as they are,” she said. “I know in my heart that I was having a good day, so we’ll just take that and we’ll take what we learned this weekend to have a good car.”

Buescher said Auto Club Speedway had a “funneling effect” where five lanes in the corner went down to one groove where everyone wanted to be on the back straightaway – up against the fence for drafting purposes.

And while he said he would have backed off the gas earlier in the race, it was time to push for a good finish with so few laps remaining. He said he drove against Patrick the same as he would against any other driver.

“We’re all drivers, we’re all racers – it doesn’t matter who it is,” said Buescher, who finished 17th. “Especially that late in the race. We had a pretty solid finish going and it’s disappointing that we had some damage there and had to come back down pit road and fix it again.”

Will the two drivers talk it out? Patrick said she wasn’t sure how to handle it, but Buescher said he’d be willing to chat with her if she wanted.

“I haven’t seen the replay yet,” he said. “I know from everybody else’s view how it looked. I know what I saw from behind the wheel.

“I don’t know if she’s real mad right now or not. Maybe I’ll talk to her today, maybe I’ll talk to her next week.”

Patrick sounded as if she may already be looking ahead.

“We’ve got Charlotte up next,” she said. “It would be nice to do well at Charlotte, being NASCAR’s hometown. I think we’re going to have a lot of confidence going into the next one, but as they say, it’s always disappointing when you don’t get those results with a few laps to go.”

Here’s a video of the incident: