Posted on 10/17/2005 1:25:19 PM PDT by Lost Highway
Their Toyota Indy 400 ended in a crash Sunday, but the action between Danica Patrick and Jaques Lazier didn't end on the track.
Afterward, fingers were pointing and poking ... and maybe even punching. And before this one's over, IndyCar promises to have a hand in it.
Patrick, who spent most of the day hovering near the back of the top 10, saw her rookie-of-the-year season end in a jarring crash with Lazier that brought out the fourth and final caution flag just 16 laps from the end of the 200-lap event.
"The first person I saw after the accident was Jaques and that wasn't a good thing," Patrick told the Long Beach Press-Telegram. "I confronted him. I told him how I felt. I was mad at him."
Once the two drivers were in the rescue vehicle after the crash, Lazier initially said that Patrick punched him in the head. Lazier later recanted, going along with Patrick's explanation of a poke to the forehead.
"Look, we had a difference of opinion about what happened, and we were both emotional," Lazier told the Indianapolis Star on Sunday evening. "If she said she hit me on the temple with her fingers, that's fine. It doesn't matter."
"My son hits harder than she does," Lazier, whose son Kayden is 4, told the Press-Telegram.
An IndyCar spokesman promised an investigation.
"There are two sides to every story," IndyCar spokesman John Griffin told the Press-Telegram. "We will investigate."
Patrick reportedly was appalled by the accusation of a punch. She claimed she was telling him to use his head.
"So you're telling me that Jaques is saying he got beat up by a girl?" Patrick told the Star through a Rahal Letterman Racing spokesperson.
Dr. Kevin Scheid was driving the rescue vehicle and told the two drivers to settle down. But he would not settle the punch/poke debate.
"I'm not going to break that tie," he told the Star, laughing.
Patrick, who came away from the crash with a sore left elbow, and Lazier, who was not injured, came together and both spun and slammed hard into the wall. Each blamed the other for the crash that set up the dramatic finish.
"That's not the way I wanted to finish my season," Patrick said. "I was on my radio all day about him. He was all over the track even when he was running by himself. No wonder he jumps around from team to team. Needless to say, I'm pretty frustrated."
Lazier said Patrick was the one at fault for continually pinching his car down in the corners.
"She didn't want to give me any room," Lazier said.
Running a pink paint scheme in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness didn't change Target/Ganassi Racing's luck because Lazier's crash was unofficially the 28th of the season for the team. Steve Chassey, an insurance executive who raced Indy cars in the 1970s and '80s, estimated Ganassi's crash damage tab for the season is higher than for the entire Champ Car World Series field.
Women Drivers! Now PMS is a licensed kill and POKE.
""So you're telling me that Jaques is saying he got beat up by a girl?" Patrick told the Star..."
No surprises that a guy named 'Jaques' would be beat up by a girl.
Bump for later - really - I want to read the article!
She needs implants.
She defends herself in a most ungracious manner. Sounds like someone has a sick, abusive personality.
Don't like racing, so this story holds no interest for me. If the person who caused the crash had been another woman racer, and they started fighting... now that's hot!
"She needs implants."
Blasphemy!
Oh, you do? Never mind...
Hotrod Pop, hope she wins one, just for the cash for some, er, inhancements.....
That's called racing, Jock-boy. You want past her, earn it. She doesn't have to give it to you.
She was on with Letterman and she was as obnoxious as Letterman!
Imagine if he had slugged her!
The only thing Danica can be blamed for is...bad aim, she should have poked him in the eye.
Doogle
Have you seen the cockpit of an Indy car? There's no room for implants.
How about these?
Lazier and his owner Ganassi are both complete idiots! Watch the replay. Lazier drifts right up into Patrick in the middle of the corner and causes the wreck. Then Ganassi has the audacity to claim Patrick pinched Lazier off, as if we couldn't see what happened ourselves.
The ultimate incongruency about Danica is that part of her press and PR image is that she wants to be taken seriously as a driver.
Pictures like this, while enjoyable, undermine that claim, since I don't see any of her racing peers doing a fleshy beefcake poster with racecars.
There's nothing wrong with exploiting her looks for marketing, but when you cross the line there is just going to be a credibility loss. Credibility, once lost, is very hard to regain.
She is a few bikini posters well past preserving her credibility (that is, to be seen as one of her peers, she needs to act like her peers).
That being said, I am a strong advocate of photos of goodlooking fit women in bikinis. And to be further fair, she benefits from being an oddity in her field: she isn't that goodlooking and doesn't really fill up the bikini nearly as well as other poster girls.
She is better looking than Shirley Muldowney, though.
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