Mike Celizic

Father doesn’t always know best. At least that’s what my kids keep telling me. But even they admit that the old man occasionally says something that makes sense.

I hope Danica Patrick knows that, because at the moment, her father couldn’t be smarter if he were Stephen Hawking.

Go South, young lady, or words to that effect, is the message T.J. Patrick says he’s giving to his daughter, who is merely the hottest property in American motor sports. Go South and trade paint with the good old boys of NASCAR on the nation’s great speedways.

It’s been the obvious choice for Patrick since she returned to the United States two years ago from England, where she was honing her skills as a professional driver. She joined the Indy tour on Bobby Rahal’s and David Letterman’s team and became the biggest thing since radial tires when she led the Indy 500 before finishing fourth.

Indy’s a big race, and Indy cars are serious open-wheel racing machines. But if you want to be America’s most famous driver, Indy cars don’t cut it. To get the glory — and the lucre — you have to drive the cars that American moonshiners invented more than half a century ago. You have to drive stock cars.

Other women have tried, most notably pioneer Janet Guthrie. But they were welcomed as warmly by the beer-and-tobacco crowd that then defined the sport as a homosexual, secular-humanist, pro-choice, Libertarian evolutionist would be at Pat Robertson’s birthday party.

Times have changed, and NASCAR is starting to understand that the worst thing that can happen by opening the circuit up to something other than white male drivers is that its ratings will rise and more sponsors will be clamoring have their logos painted on speeding billboards.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out. Baseball became enormously popular with Italian-American immigrants in the late 1930s, when Joe DiMaggio became one of the best players in the game. It got another belated boost in 1947 when Jackie Robinson broke the game’s color barrier. The NBA’s popularity around the world as risen in direct relation to the number of European, African, Australian and Asian players joining the game.

More diversity equals more interest. The old fans don’t stop watching when you bring in new faces. If anything, their interest increases because they want their hero to beat your hero.

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It has taken NASCAR a long time to come to that realization. But as the sport was growing within a well-defined fan base, it probably didn’t feel it needed to. Now, if it hopes to continue to expand, it has to reach out to groups who haven’t felt a burning need to watch because there hasn’t been anyone driving with whom they can identify.

Even though Roush Racing officials said Patrick's father's conversations were with a low-level official, CNBC reported, it's still a start.

The circuit still doesn’t have a top-notch African-American driver, which is somewhere below pathetic. But the news broke recently that Formula One driver Juan Pablo Montoya, who is from Colombia, and not the one in South Carolina but the one in South America, is going to drive a stock car next year for Chip Ganassi.

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