Danica gives Herta some props

After 50 races, two teams and endless questions, Danica Patrick won the first IndyCar Series race of her career in Motegi, Japan, over the weekend.
Patrick, who became the first woman to win an Indy Racing League IndyCar Series race, was asked which one of her teammates has helped her the most over the years.
She has quite an impressive list of teammates to choose from. She been on the same teams as Tony Kanaan, Dario Franchitti, Marco Andretti and Buddy Rice. That’s two Indianapolis 500 winners, two IRL champions and an Andretti.
She said Bryan Herta.
Patrick mentioned Franchitti, Kanaan and Andretti, but a conversation she had with Herta last year at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course stood out.
“I was on the front row for the first time on a road course, which was great,” Patrick said Sunday during the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, “and he said, ‘You know, when you win your first race, you’re going to go, I wasn’t doing anything different that day, it just happened.’ I wasn’t doing anything different yesterday, it just happened. He was right.”
It was Herta’s crew and team at Andretti Green Racing that Patrick inherited last year. A number of the same people that worked on Herta’s team are still with Patrick’s.
Herta, who drives for Andretti Green Racing in the American Le Mans Series now, said he remembers having that conversation with Patrick at Mid-Ohio.
“There was a lot of pressure on Danica to win and she hadn’t yet,” said Herta, a Valencia resident and Hart High of Newhall graduate. “She was already doing a great job. Nobody puts more pressure on Danica than Danica.”
He was trying to share his experiences with her. Herta won his first race in the old CART series at Laguna Seca in 1998 and won his first IRL race at Kansas Speedway in 2003. Both times, he did nothing out of the ordinary, there was nothing super-human about them. Things just sort of came together.
“You think it’s going to be so much harder, but it’s not,” Herta said.
Now that she’s won a race, it’s only going to make her better, Herta said.
“It definitely takes the question she’s been asked the most away,” Herta said. “It will free her up to focus on racing more consistently. She will become an even better driver now because of this.”
Patrick said her teammates have always demonstrated a tremendous amount of confidence in her. She said she was lucky to have those kind of teammates around her, especially at Andretti Green Racing.
“My teammates always said things like when you win your first race, when you win, this is what we’re going to do, and they always put that in my head,” Patrick said. “While I always believed it, it was nice to hear from guys like Tony Kanaan and Dario Franchitti. It’s a big honor, and I think that put that positive frame of mind and that presence there every time.”