Danica Patrick earns season-best 14th-place finish Sunday at Fontana - MotorSportsTalk

Ever since the season-opening Daytona 500 and in each of the four races that have followed, NASCAR media has been able to report the same thing after each race: Danica Patrick enjoyed her best finish thus far of the 2014 Sprint Cup season.

Admittedly, the first two finishes – 40th at Daytona and 36th at Phoenix – weren’t much to write home about.

But Patrick has shown steady progress since then, finishing 21st at Las Vegas, 18th last Sunday at Bristol and yet another season best in Sunday’s Auto Club 400 at Auto Club Speedway, where she finished a very respectable 14th.

Patrick, who qualified 27th for the race, might have finished even higher at the end, but a tire issue on Lap 139 caused her to lose ground before rallying back strong for the eventual top-15 showing.

“It seems like some of our most trying weekends end up with our better results,” Patrick said. “We will take it and we will know that there is so much more potential for those weekends where we feel like we are running a lot better.”

It was Patrick’s best Sprint Cup series showing since finishing 14th in last July’s Coke Zero 400 at Daytona International Speedway.

“We just made little adjustments here and there,” Patrick said. “I don’t think we were extremely fast, but we were fast enough to pick them off and move up and have a steady day.

“It’s nice when you get fortunate and lucky and your best running position on track happens to be the last lap so I will take it – that doesn’t normally happen.”

Now in her second full Sprint Cup season, Sunday’s finish tied her fourth-best overall in her Cup career. Her three best finishes were all last year: eighth in the season-opening Daytona 500 (after starting from the pole), 12th at Martinsville last spring and 13th at Michigan, also in the spring.

With Sunday’s finish, Patrick moved up one position in the season standings to 27th, a far cry from where she was after Daytona (37th) and Phoenix (39th).

What’s more, as hard as it may seem to believe, Patrick is now just two positions behind Stewart-Haas Racing teammate Kevin Harvick (25th) and three spots behind fellow teammate Kurt Busch (24th).

Busch, of note, climbed seven places in the rankings after leading the overall SHR contingent with a third-place finish in Sunday’s race.

Patrick is now 94 points behind new series leader Carl Edwards, while Busch is 87 points back and Harvick 89 points out of first.

Team co-owner and leader Tony Stewart finished fifth in the race to climb to 17th in the standings, just 59 points behind Edwards.

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In a continuing effort to help fans keep track of the on track action, SuperMotocross is in the process of developing and implementing leader lights for the unified series.

Currently Supercross (SMX) utilizes stanchions in the infield that are triggered manually by a race official. At least two stanchions are used in each race as a way to draw the eye to the leader, which is especially useful in the tight confines of the stadium series when lapping often begins before the halfway mark in the 22-bike field. This system has been in place for the past two decades.

Later this year, a fully automated system will move to the bike itself to replace the old system. At that point, fans will be able to identify the leader regardless of where he is on track.

The leader lights were tested in the second Anaheim round this year. An example can be seen at the 1:45 mark in the video above on the No. 69 bike.

“What we don’t want to do is move too fast, where it’s confusing to people,” said Mike Muye, senior director of operations for Supercross and SMX in a press release. “We’ve really just focused on the leader at this point with the thought that maybe down the road we’ll introduce others.”

Scheduled to debut with the first SuperMotocross World Championship race at zMax Dragway, located just outside the Charlotte Motor Speedway, a 3D carbon fiber-printed LED light will be affixed to each motorcycle. Ten timing loops positioned around the track will trigger the lights of the leader, which will turn green.

SMX’s partner LiveTime Scoring helped develop and implement the system that has been tested in some form or fashion since 2019.

When the leader lights are successfully deployed, SuperMotocross will explore expanding the system to identify the second- and third-place riders. Depending on need and fan acceptance, more positions could be added.

SuperMotocross is exploring future enhancements, including allowing for live fan interaction with the lights and ways to use the lighting system during the race’s opening ceremony.

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