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Danica Patrick SI Swimsuit

February 28, 2012 by · Comments Off on Danica Patrick SI Swimsuit 

Danica Patrick SI Swimsuit, Even if you are not an Indy racing fan, you’ve probably heard of Danica Patrick. She is the first woman to win an IndyCar race. She finished higher than any other woman in history at the Indianapolis 500. (She placed third in 2009.) Her debut tonight at the Daytona 500 marks only the third time in history a woman has competed at this season-opening event. Nielsen announced over the weekend that Patrick has become a household name, with a full 30 percent of the United States population recognizing who she is (most female athlete’s recognition levels never climb higher than 9 percent). And to top it all off, she’s also 233 percent more well-known than the average motorsports athlete.

In most cases, this level of notoriety would signal simply that a female athlete is at the top of her game (think The Williams Sisters) or has a really excellent publicist — possibly both. But Patrick’s racing arguably isn’t the reason most people know her. Her fame has to derive in large part from the sexy ads for domain registry site GoDaddy. That means that while her positive impact on the racing world has been noted — The New York Times has called Patrick the “hook that draws sponsors back to the sport” — it’s not so clear whether “The Danica Effect” has been good for women.

On the one hand, the GoDaddy ads are absolutely sexist. This year’s Superbowl ad featured Patrick and fitness guru Jillian Michaels applying body paint to the nu*e body of model Natalia Velez — essentially turning her skin into advertising space, a decal-covered sports car advertising Patrick’s sponsor. The ad’s tagline — “get noticed,” spoken over a slow-motion shot of the model’s body — offered lots of ammunition to those who accuse Patrick of using her looks to get attention that her performance on the track doesn’t.

Danica Patrick SI Swimsuit

February 27, 2012 by · Comments Off on Danica Patrick SI Swimsuit 

Danica Patrick SI Swimsuit, On the Tuesday before heading east to prepare for the most-hyped race of her life, Danica Patrick popped the cork on a mini-celebration with husband Paul Hospenthal.

Patrick entered the couple’s enormous wine cellar in their Scottsdale, Ariz., home and picked a 2004 bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon from their favorite part of Napa Valley.

“We’d never had it because they were like, ‘Don’t drink it for 10 years,’ but I figured we’d waited long enough,” Patrick says. “Paul said, ‘It’s Valentine’s Day. We’re going into a big year, and it’s going to be great. We’re headed to the Daytona 500. Honey, go pull something good.’ ”

It might have seemed presumptuous to be toasting before she had turned an official lap in NASCAR’s premier series, given that Patrick has said her success would be determined by winning. But in some ways, much of the hard work already had been done well in advance of Sunday’s season-opening Daytona 500.

The third woman to start NASCAR’s biggest race will be the first to make her Sprint Cup debut with so much experience weathering the stress of intense scrutiny. The first woman to lead the Indianapolis 500, as a rookie in 2005, she has handled years of questions about her gender-defying rise through the motor sports world, her transcendent impact despite only one Indy-Car race victory and, of course, her lightning-rod sex appeal.

With a tight but trusted cadre of a half-dozen advisers and assistants helping curate her highly coveted brand, Patrick ranks among the most recognized and respected names in professional sports. She arrives at racing’s top level as a mainstream global attraction in auto racing, whose reliance on corporate sponsorship creates a sway to play environment where having an alluring personality can be as important as excelling on track.

“No driver has been so marketed, prepared and coiffed for a season of racing in the history of the sport,” says H.A. “Humpy” Wheeler, a racing consultant who has spent nearly a half-century in the industry and was the longtime president of Charlotte Motor Speedway. “Just about the time you think she has left for racing’s shadows she reappears like the Sphinx. Even her pairings with Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Tony Stewart, are storybook. Everything about her seems magnificently scripted.”

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