Driver: Danica Patrick
Car: No. 7 Tissot/GoDaddy Chevrolet
Track: Auto Club Speedway (Oct. 9, 2010)
Bio: Now a skeleton of what it once was, Danica Patrick’s best chance to make a top-15 finish in her first season as a stock car driver with JR Motorsports went up in smoke roughly 10 laps from the end of the CampingWorld.com 300 NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Auto Club Speedway in this No. 7 Chevy.
With a stated goal of finishing in the top 15, Patrick was getting it done as the laps wound down. She was running 14th, battling among a pack of cars coming off Turn 2 when she was turned by the trailing car of James Buescher. Buescher in turn was being pushed by Brian Scott, and the contact from Scott’s Ford shoved Buescher into the right rear quarterpanel of Patrick’s Tissot/GoDaddy No. 7 Chevrolet.
Patrick’s car hooked hard to the right, hit the outside retaining wall and leapt into the air before settling back down and spinning toward the pit entrance on the 2-mile oval. In the scrum that followed the accident, Ricky Stenhouse Jr. slammed into the car of Ricky Carmichael, putting a serious crimp in both drivers’ chances for a solid finish.
In her eighth start with JRM and second on the ACS oval, Patrick was relegated to 30th place at the finish. For her first season in the heavier, less-nimble stock cars, Patrick and crew chief Tony Eury Jr. had put together a solid strategy for the fast layout in Fontana, which Patrick had competed on in a previous IndyCar start in 2005.
It all went up in smoke, and the car was practically destroyed, with damage on all four corners. It limped its way to the Racecar Graveyard soon after, where it sits today. As the pictures show, there was considerably less sheet metal than the car started its day with.