Patrick looks for another good run

JOLIET, Ill. — Chicagoland Speedway is about the closest thing Danica Patrick has to a home track in NASCAR.

Although the 1.5-mile oval on the outskirts of Chicago’s southwest suburbs didn’t play a part in her early racing career - it didn’t open until 2001 - it’s only about 100 miles away from her hometown of Rockford, Ill.

That means she will have plenty of family and friends here for today’s NASCAR Nationwide race.

“As a kid, I loved going into the city, downtown Chicago,” Patrick said before Saturday’s practice. “It’s a beautiful place. I know we’re a little bit away from there, but I’ve got some friends coming out to the track this weekend, so it’ll be a couple extra people than normal. But it’s close to home, and that’s good, and I’ll see a few familiar faces.”

Based on her 10th-place run last June, she’ll also have a shot at a pretty good finish. Patrick was the second fastest driver in Saturday afternoon’s final practice session.

As Patrick continues her transition from IndyCar to NASCAR, she said she is most comfortable on intermediate-length tracks with banked turns such as Chicagoland.

Although racing a stock car is much different than racing an IndyCar at any track, Patrick said the way a stock car handles on a track such as Chicagoland is the most similar sensation to what she experienced in Indy racing.

In addition to running a full Nationwide Series schedule this season, she is also running part-time in the Sprint Cup Series. She recently added a track that’s similar to Chicagoland - Kansas Speedway - to her Sprint Cup schedule.

“For me, I feel like mile and-a-half, bigger tracks, and the higher-grip tracks of those, I feel like there’s just a little bit more of a similarity to where I came from,” Patrick said. “With the way that it loads up in the corner and the way that you can feel the car pick up G-forces in the corner and you can feel the [suspension] load. As opposed to the slippery or flatter tracks, slower tracks.”

Patrick acknowledges she isn’t yet as comfortable at short tracks or tracks without banking. But she said she felt better when Kasey Kahne, a fellow driver from an open-wheel background, told her that he had a tough time learning flat tracks as well - not that it showed much last week when Kahne won the Sprint Cup Series race at New Hampshire.

“It didn’t really show that he struggles at short tracks, just because of the fact that he won, but he said that they took the longest for him to get used to as well, ” Patrick said. “Both of us kind of having our open-wheel backgrounds, I think that it was almost a relief sometimes to hear, to understand a little bit more why the short tracks are a little bit harder.”

While plenty of established NASCAR stars started out in open-wheel racing, Patrick said drivers who took the traditional path from short-track racing to stock cars might be better prepared for some tracks.