A lot of things go into dictating whether a driver can win or not in their respective racing series. Among racing fans, it seems that a lot agree that Danica Patrick isn’t focused on Indycar enough this year, as she has been pursuing a foray into the Nascar Nationwide Series. However, this isn’t the only reason she has been doing worse this year in particular. Right now, the Indycar series is still dominated by Ganassi and Penske, the two top team-owners in the sport. Not that this is a bad thing, but for other drivers in the field, if you’re not driving a car built by Penske or Ganassi it’s going to be harder to win. Cars built by these two teams are consistently the most successful. Danica Patrick drives for Andretti Autosport, a 4-car team with teammates Tony Kanaan, Ryan Hunter-Reay, and Marco Andretti. As far as I’m aware, this team is considered third in line behind the superpowers of Ganassi and Penske. So far this season, cars built by Penske have 7 wins, cars built by Ganassi have 4, and cars built by Andretti have the other 2. Ryan Hunter-Reay and Tony Kanaan are the Andretti drivers who have found victory lane this year. But finally, as hard as it is to pinpoint one reason why a driver is or isn’t winning or running up front, you have to face the fact that Danica Patrick is actually way over-hyped. She has only won 1 race in Indycar in her career, and it was a race that she won on fuel-milage; still respectable, but there’s always that hint of an asterisk next to it and people that will tell you she got lucky. In a way all fuel-mileage wins in racing are lucky, but you have to take them as they come. Danica has now driven in close to 100 races in Indycar and still only has that one win to her name. Sure she’s consistent, enough to finish 5th in the points last year (highest of any non Ganassi or Penske driver), but I think the biggest piece of the puzzle is just the fact that she’s not a driver who wins races anyway, and therefore she will seldom be seen in victory lane unless that is to change.