Though she has shown obvious progress in the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series this year with Tony Gibson on her pit box, Danica Patrick on Friday expressed an open-minded attitude toward the crew chief and team changes that will take Gibson to Kurt Busch’s car and Daniel Knost, Busch’s current crew chief, to Patrick’s No. 10 Stewart-Haas Racing Chevrolet, effective after Sunday’s race at Martinsville.
Gibson is an old-school racer who worked as car chief on championship teams of Alan Kulwicki and Jeff Gordon and as crew chief for Steve Park, Michael Waltrip, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Ryan Newman before taking over as pit boss of Patrick’s car near the end of the 2012 season.
Knost is an engineer, more typical of the background of crew chiefs Patrick worked with in the IndyCar Series before transitioning to NASCAR racing. So does the change reflect a move Patrick felt she needed to take to sustain her progress in the sport?
“I’m not sure,” Patrick reflected. “I think that things had started to definitely take a nice turn in a better direction the last part of the year, and so I was open-minded to anything. Like I said, ultimately, at the end of the day, these decisions are not made by me, so I feel like things have been going in a nice direction, but, again, there’s a bigger scale of things going on than just me.
“So the rearranging took place, but I’m very open-minded, and I’m not scared of change. I definitely am one that believes you can’t know if something could be better unless you try it. So I’m ready for the challenge and the change and the possibility of it being better than what it is.
“I am afraid of changing my hairstyle, though—I have never done that.”
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