If Cope can win Daytona, then Danica has shot, too

NASCAR is back, though, like a smoker's cough, it never really seems to go away. I think the NASCAR offseason lasts about five days.

The Daytona 500 is next Sunday, and this year there will be a woman driver in it. And not just any woman driver. Danica Patrick, fresh off her appearance in another GoDaddy.com Super Bowl commercial in which she got all sexed-up and unzipped her jumpsuit to a provocative position, is leaving the Indy 500 behind for the Daytona 500. Her first Sprint Cup race will be in the biggest race of the Sprint Cup season.

And you know what?

She can win it.

Auto racing is much more difficult to predict than the stick-and-ball sports, which is what guys from small towns in the Carolinas call football, baseball, basketball and hockey. These variables are magnified at places such as Daytona, where the cars mostly tool around in tandem or in large packs for like 495 miles. Then for the last five miles, they try to break free of their drafting partners and be the first one to cross the finish line. There's a certain amount of luck involved.

Daytona is where whim trades paint with whimsy. It's an inexact science, at best. It's more psychology than technology, like looking at an ink blot. Jimmie Johnson may see it one way, Tony Stewart another. The Busch brothers might drive their cars right through it on the pit lane.

This is why the last 10 Daytona 500s have produced 10 different winners.

Last year, a kid named Trevor Bayne won it. Bayne had a grand total of one Sprint Cup race under his belt before winning NASCAR's biggest race. The next week, Bayne finished 40th at Phoenix.

In 2001, Michael Waltrip won it. Waltrip raced under the checkered flag at about the same time Dale Earnhardt was crashing on the last turn. That was the bigger story, a tragic story. But Waltrip's win was a story, too: It snapped his 0-for-462 losing streak in Cup races.

It was like Mario Mendoza hitting a walk-off home run in the World Series.

Just to prove that his first Daytona 500 victory wasn't a fluke -- or that it was -- two years later, Waltrip won it again.

Even in the days when Daytona offered straight-up racing, sans packs and tandems, it has produced unlikely champions. In 1990, when Earnhardt had a flat tire on the last lap, a guy named Derrike Cope won it. Cope, who grew up in Washington, ran in 409 Cup races over 25 years. He won only one other time.

This is why Danica Patrick can win NASCAR's biggest race.

She will have to keep her nose clean, not powdered. And when The Big One happens, which is what they call it at Daytona when the cars start spinning and crashing all at once, she'll have to zig when the other cars zag.

She'll also need a friend or two with whom to draft or run in tandem. Stewart and Ryan Newman say they'll oblige the lady with a 200 mph dance. So will Kevin Harvick. A couple of years ago, when Danica was just starting out in the stock cars, Harvick literally showed her the fast way around Las Vegas Motor Speedway during a Nationwide Series race by pointing his finger out the window.

This way, young lady. Follow me.

"Coming over here, she didn't have expectations set way too high, like a lot of guys who come in," said Harvick, the 2007 Daytona 500 winner. "She wanted to come in, figure it out and now she's gonna do it full time, so she can focus all of her attention on it. She's gonna do great.

"I know a lot of people give her a hard time and there's a lot of attention on her, but she puts everything she has into it. In the end, she's good for our sport."

As Harvick said, Patrick is not just another pretty face when it comes to wheeling a racecar around the oval. She was pretty good in the Indy-style cars; she was getting pretty good in the Nationwide cars when last season (finally) ended.

When you see her at the track, she's not all dolled up for a Maxim photo shoot. She pulls her hair back in a ponytail and leaves the makeup in her motor coach. Tough as nails, this one. Part Joan of Arc, part Joan Jett, the leather-clad rocker. Patrick has developed a carbon-fiber personality, because there are a lot of people who want to see her fail.

I have seen her cry only twice: When she won her only IndyCar race, in Japan, and last October at LVMS, when Dan Wheldon died.

In each case, tears were acceptable.

If Danica Patrick wins the Daytona 500, she can cry all the way until her next scheduled Cup race at Darlington, S.C., on May 12, where she probably will finish 40th.

Las Vegas Review-Journal sports columnist Ron Kantowski can be reached at rkantowski@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0352. Follow him on Twitter: @ronkantowski.