Patrick ready to put Indy crash behind her

[May 31, 2008]  WEST ALLIS, Wis. (AP) -- Danica Patrick isn't apologizing to Ryan Briscoe or anyone else.

Even with nearly a week to cool down since Briscoe hit her car on pit road last Sunday, ending her quest for an Indy 500 victory, Patrick hasn't changed her tune about the incident or her angry, aborted march toward Briscoe's pit stall.

"I don't regret those things," Patrick said Friday at the Milwaukee Mile, where she and the rest of the IRL IndyCar Series drivers will get back on track over the weekend.

The suburban Milwaukee track is also where Patrick had a brief pit road confrontation with Dan Wheldon a year ago following an on-track incident during the race.

"You know, adrenaline's pumping," she said of the post-race blowups. "That usually lasts after every weekend, after every time you're on the track in race situation, for an hour or two after. Your adrenaline's up. You're thinking about it, talking, sort of debriefing the whole thing. That's the same pretty much every weekend."

Her confrontation with Wheldon last year ended with her giving the Chip Ganassi Racing driver a small shove as he walked away. Both laughed it off later, saying there was no bad blood between them.

The brief search for Briscoe at Indy ended well short of Briscoe's pit stall when a speedway security man suddenly appeared by her side and coaxed Patrick over the pit wall and back to her garage.

"I don't regret my instincts and emotions, nor can I change them very easily," she said Friday. "I try to not live with those kinds of regrets. I think everything happens for a reason."

Patrick and Briscoe talked briefly hours after the 500 and Briscoe said Thursday that neither of them apologized or took blame for the incident.

"I think the one thing we've agreed on is, we both want to just move on," Briscoe told The Associated Press. "And I'm happy we've got a race this weekend so we can put that behind us."

Patrick agreed, saying, "As a race car driver, I don't know if any of us have that hard a time. ... We go on to the next event. All we're concerned about is performing at that next event.

"I mean, for myself, I forget the weekend before pretty quickly. It's not that difficult. It's just kind of my nature. ... I think a lot of us drivers are probably the same."

With 27 cars - nine more than last year - entered for Sunday's ABC Supply A.J. Foyt 225 on the one-mile oval, Patrick noted there's a pretty good chance for more dramatic moments among the ultra competitive drivers.

"For the most part, almost every weekend it does happen," she said. "You know, there's usually somebody that you walk away from the track not liking that weekend for some particular reason. So that's pretty common

"Being a short track like this, putting all these cars on one track, it's definitely possible that people are going to be fighting for the same road. But I think that it's good here that we can two-wide, as well."

Patrick added, "That's just racing. If we were all polite to each other every second, it wouldn't be racing. We have to race hard. ... You can't be too aggressive that people don't respect you because you're driving like an idiot. And then there's the other side of it, being too passive and people just think of you as weaker on the track because of that.

"You always have to walk that fine line in racing with being respected for being a tough competitor, but fair."

Indy winner Scott Dixon was also at the track Friday, looking forward to putting a week of interviews and appearances behind him and getting back in his race car for what he called "some quiet time."

Asked what he would do if Patrick came looking for him after a race, Dixon grinned and replied, "I'll be running, man, I'll be running. I think if you get involved in that, it can only be bad."

He wasn't about to place blame for the Indianapolis collision, either.

"I think it was a total racing incident," Dixon said. "It's a narrow pit. I think the only thing that Briscoe maybe did wrong, which all of us do, is spin the wheels too much, got into the side of her. I've been involved in so many of those accidents on pit road, you can't do anything about it. That's just one of those things."

[Associated Press; By MIKE HARRIS]

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.