Danica Patrick finally put together a complete weekend from start-to-finish, running strong in practice, qualifying well and earning a strong finish in the race. In this case, it was a career-best seventh-place finish in Saturday night's 5-Hour Energy 400 at Kansas Speedway.
Patrick was asked about her weekend after the race:
"It felt good. My goal was just to stay up in that lead group. Generally average out to where I was starting, and I feel we did all that. I’m really overall proud of the team for building cars like these. This was a new car. It was so good. It shows when the runs were long, I got to show this was a quick car," she said. "I’m so happy for GoDaddy always being behind me. I know that we haven’t had the best of times, but we work hard for it. It’s days like today when this is the kind of stuff that materializes in wins. We’ve just got to keep hanging around and doing what we’re doing. I’m just proud of everyone for working really hard and believing in me."
Patrick was asked to describe the weekend.
"Drama free. Jay (Guarneri) said this is what we call putting a whole weekend together. We weren’t great great in practice, but we came through in qualifying. Smart about the changes, Gibson did a good job making changes for the race. It was good from the get-go, what it says even more is two things: Really good on restarts and when it wasn’t quite right. Really good on long runs. That just goes to show this is a new car, and they build a great one. We’ve got more of these coming. That’s the even better news. Overall proud for the team. Kevin (Harvick)’s been a great teammate and helping me out, he was very fast tonight. I was surprised to see he didn’t win, but congrats to Jeff and happy for GoDaddy, who’s always been a big supporter of mine no matter what, and it’s days like today that hopefully makes them smile and start to pay off a little."