Ummm. No, this is not Formula 1.  This is Indy and they just turn left so the ability to distribute that weight is a significant advantage.  I think Danica is a superb driver  but, until the recent rule changes, she had a significant weight advantage, period.

It would be interesting to know what the average driver weight in the IRL is.  I would be surprised if Danica had a 100 lb advantage on any competitive driver before the rule changes.  I do believe that before the rule changes, her team had at least a 1 mph advantage over any other IRL team and that is huge.  So why did she not win a bunch of races before Japan?  Personal opinion (and that is all it is), she was not that great a driver before Japan  (has absolutely nothing to do with her gender).  I expect to see Danica win more IRL races.  She is a very good race car driver, but there are several other current IRL drivers that, under even conditions, will beat her badly.  Just my opinion…

" Danica Patrick hit a member of Dale Coyne’s crew on pit road Friday afternoon."

chad’s last blog post..Starbucks free WiFi

  There is a rule that they ballast the cars to match weights of cars and drivers? Then it comes down to skill? "Skill of engineering to make the car as light as possable", you said.
Why?
Why waste the time , money and more important"skill" of the engineers to make the cars light if they are then going to be weighted down to balance the field. Where is the incentive to increase mans’ ( not forgetting Danica and her sisters ) ablity to strive for ever better?You could argue that the ability to distribute the weigth to enhance performance will…but wait! No! this is formulae 1. Not NASCAR,which only turns to the left. These cars are balanced. Claiming that engineering developements on the track will aid in advancing safer cars for the general public. This kind of rule is delaying safer roads for us all.

Gordon’s whinging is standard in the racing business, which at the top end is as much political as it is technical. Feministing’s whinging is because they see absolutely everything through a pair of evil-patriarchy sunglasses.

At this level of performance, differences don’t have to look huge to be huge. The estimate of 100 lbs = 1 second per lap in Formula 1 is probably not far off. In F1, a second a lap is big. On some circuits, it’s the difference between 1st and 10th. That’s why F1 uses ballast. The cars have a dry weight limit. They all carry the same driver/ballast weight. The differences after that are all skill: engineering skill to get the car as light and powerful as possible without sacrificing reliability, driving skill of course, and team management skill. Cars full of fuel are markedly slower (and anyone who doubts that Patrick’s weight is an advantage need only watch an F1 race at, say, Monza) than cars low on fuel, and management of that is very important.

All in all, Gordon’s blustering, Feministing don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about (nothing new there) and Danica Patrick is a hell of a driver.

My only thought looking at that picture, is "Damn, that is one smug-looking self-satisfied woman." She looks like she just ate the canary, the goldfish and chased the doberman out of the house. All she needs is a thought balloon saying "Yeah, I’m bad. Badass! Badder than baddass! Kiss my shapely Sports Illustrated model butt you pathetic losers!"

CosmicConservative’s last blog post..The Daily Toon

One of the things I learned was that at the end of one of the 500-mile Memorial Day races at the Indianapolis Speedway, finishing drives would have lost five pounds of weight. Clearly, race car driving is one of the most physically demanding of sports, and the body muscles probably are used in ways that most of the rest of us could never even conceptualize.

So Danica Patrick must be one tough woman, even at 100 lbs. I’m certain she wins races because she is a better driver, not because she is 100 lbs lighter than some fat-ass whose body perhaps is more suitable for football than staying alive to finish a race on the ground at speeds exceeding 200 mph.

As has been suggested here. Try looking around for smaller skilled drivers. Best of all, hire a lot more women like Danica Patrick. Probably it will improve the competition.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI 

In a more interesting racing world, the other teams would be encouraged to compensate for that weight advantage by increasing horsepower, improving the car’s aerodynamics, etc. Unfortunately Formula One has decided that regulation, uniformity, and safety are more important than rewarding that kind of ingenuity, so the teams are pretty much forbidden them from doing any of those things. It seems like the only response possible to any innovation is to make a new rule to forbid it as quickly as possible. They’ll turn it into NASCAR before they’re done. Smokey Yunick would be bored to tears.

bcostin’s last blog post..Today we’ll be reading from Pelosi 4:22

What are you guys arguing about?