She might not have been successful in the NASCAR Cup Series but Danica Patrick shattered gender stereotypes surrounding motorsports in 2008 when she became the first woman to win an IndyCar race. Speaking to former Cup Series driver Kenny Wallace, the 42-year-old spoke about her experience of going to the Far East and how their method of getting water off a race track was quite pointless.

The most unusual of methods to dry a whole race track

It turns out that in Japan when a race track gets wet, people have to physically get water off the track with towels and buckets. This practice has gone on in the country for several years despite being quite tedious. That was apparently one of the reasons why Patrick’s race victory came a day after the scheduled date. Seems like all that delay might have helped her become more composed and understand the track better to allow her to take the checkered flag ahead of her competitors.

“Watching the track feed…you’re watching these ladies, these lovely ladies with towels and buckets sopping up the weepers on the track and then wringing them into buckets…it’s like sweeping water at the shore back into the ocean man, it’s just really pointless but there were some weepers which was part of the problem that it took so long to dry the track. That’s why we probably raced the next day,” she said to Kenny Wallace’s utter disbelief.

Going to Japan and staying there was a good experience for the former IndyCar driver. Apparently, she went there in 2008 during the cherry blossom season, and the beautiful pink flowers had bloomed all around the track. But finding something interesting to watch on the telly was a struggle so the former motorsports athlete turned to sumo wrestling.

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Sumo wrestling kept Danica Patrick from being bored in Japan

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Sumo wrestling, as is common knowledge, is an integral part of Japanese culture. You don’t need to understand the words they’re speaking to understand sumo wrestling and that’s exactly what happened with Patrick. The story was so intriguing that even Kenny Wallace admitted that his guest was “fun.”

“The year that I won, there was rain to it was delayed a day so we raced kind of mid-morning the next day. I remember that night in the hotel room, there was track feed to your hotel room TV which is pretty much more interesting than anything apart from sumo wrestling cause I didn’t understand a word anybody else was saying but the sumo, you can understand that,” she said.

Regardless of her lack of success in NASCAR, Danica Patrick will always go down as one of the first women to beat a bunch of men in a sport in which no one expected her to do well in the first place.

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