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Danica Patrick says Indy 500 plans complete

Although she stopped short of announcing a team with which she’ll compete during the month of May, Danica Patrick on Monday asserted that her plans to run the Indianapolis 500, scheduled to be the final race of her career, are set.

“No, I just needed to make sure (the deal) was done. The rest I don’t really care about,” Patrick quipped when asked about specific details in a story posted on IndyCar’s website.

With GoDaddy as a sponsor for her venture, Patrick’s only scheduled races for 2018 are this weekend’s Daytona 500, where she will be competing with Premium Motorsports, and the Indy 500.

Patrick later added that she and her team will have something significant planned for the Indy 500 announcement.

“Obviously, the start of this (NASCAR) season didn’t happen any different than last season did, where I showed up and I hadn’t been in the car since Homestead,” she said. “It’s no different than that. But Indy is obviously totally different. We’ll do something a little more substantial for the announcement and the unveil.”

Patrick finished by saying that finishing off her career with the Indy 500 holds a great amount of personal significance to her.

“There’s nothing against Daytona, but just from being a young little girl, I had always wanted to win the Indy 500,” Patrick explained. “It’s not to say that Daytona is not an enormous deal. But I have to go with what feels like the most important in my heart and I came from open-wheel racing, I wanted to win the Indy 500 from being a go-kart driver when I was a kid and came close a few times. It’s kind of what started it all for me, so there’s just a lot more history there.”

Possible landing spots for Patrick include Ed Carpenter Racing, Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing, and Schmidt Peterson Motorsports, all of whom traditionally field extra entries beyond their full-season efforts for the Indy 500. Dreyer and Reinbold Racing, which fielded a one-off entry for Sage Karam last year, could also be in play.

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