Danica Patrick shared the "normal-ish" life she has dating fellow NASCAR driver Ricky Stenhouse Jr. on Derek Jeter’s new website, The Players Tribune, and admitted the two are in sync like the Montagues and the Capulets.
"If it’s crazy to want to go to sleep next to the person who ran your car off the road going 200 miles per hour earlier that day, then I’m certifiable,"
Patrick wrote for The Players Tribune. "Ricky Stenhouse Jr. is a balls-to-the wall, go-hard-or-go-home, lift-only-when-you-see-God-twice kind of NASCAR driver. He’s Ford. I’m Chevy. It’s the Montagues and the Capulets. He’s grits. I’m granola. We’re the opposite in almost every way.”
In an open article talking about dating, the future, and being a female NASCAR driver, Patrick admitted that sometimes Stenhouse’s only saving grace is that he’s "cuddly."
"Which really helps his cause, because sometimes I’m not very happy with him," she said. "When we crashed Sept. 12 at Chicagoland Speedway, we had an old-fashioned racing disagreement. Ricky thought I was going to leave him a lane — he thought wrong. I didn’t think he was there anymore, so I went up the track and we hit the wall."
Whatever the challenges, Patrick is up to them because she’s “no stranger to doing things differently,” the driver wrote.
“Ricky had a bad race. I had my best-ever finish. I was very happy. He was very bummed, and the plane ride was quiet. But after about 10 minutes, we did what all drivers do in awkward moments of silence,” she said. “We talked about how our cars were running. Pretty soon, everything in our relationship was back to normal. Well, our normal anyway.”
And that normal is good for a woman who learned early in her career that she races better when she’s happy.
“That’s when it dawned on me that I race better when I’m happy. And Ricky makes me happy, even if he pisses me off on the track every now and then,” she wrote.
Fans enjoyed Patrick’s frank talk about relationships.
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