Steve Parker Motoring / The Car Nut: SHE'S THE MAN! DANICA PATRICK WINS "HONDA 300" AT TWIN RING MOTEGI, JAPAN

To paraphrase Richard Nixon, "They won't have Danica Patrick to kick around anymore". And in a nation where women are traditionally held in much lower esteem than men, perhaps a few more women throughout Japan won't have to ask their dads or husbands or oniichan ("cute older brother") for the keys to the car anymore ... Now that Danica Patrick has become the first woman to win an Indycar race, and she did it in Japan. (Be sure to check our left-hand margin for an all-new Photo Album featuring Danica Patrick's historic win at Motegi, or simply click anywhere on this line!)

And, oh yeah ... America's best open-wheel racers will once again be competing in a single series after this weekend, with Motegi the last IRL-only event and Long Beach's street race the final Champ Car event of all time. So, racing history is being made in more than one way this weekend ... And as we watch it all transpire, live and in HD. What a country! (Photos --- Danica Patrick in Victory Circle at Motegi, Japan, and greeting the media following the race).

She's become the first woman to ever win a major open-wheel series racing event, claiming the checkered flag at Twin Ring Motegi, a 1.5-mile D-shaped oval about 70 miles north of Tokyo in a mountainous area of Honshu, Japan's main island. (Photos --- Danica Patrick at speed on the track at Motegi, Japan, and greeting the media following the race).

Patrick ran at a slow, measured pace after taking on the last 22-gallons of fuel in her #7 Andretti Green Racing team car, a Dallara chassis powered by a 650-horsepower Honda engine and shod with Firestone tires. Taking direction from her pit crew, she saved enough fuel to still be running at a fast pace at lap #200, the final lap of the event. (Photo below --- Perhaps some future Danicas arrive at the track).

After the race, Patrick mentioned several times to various microphones that winning "wasn't hard", that it didn't feel any different from running her "regular" race, if the word regular can be used to describe a sport which consists of driving around a race track at nearly 200 miles an hour with competitors of varying degrees of skill. She seemed somewhat surprised by the relative normalcy of it all. Apparently she didn't have to "dig deep" as Indycar announcer Scott Goodyear opined after the race; Patrick learned that she was fine, but that a complete, very serious team effort is what brings a win. (Photo below --- Danica's hand-in-hand work with her pit crew brought her the first victory ever by a woman in a major US-based open-wheel race series).

And her win meant a lot to Michael Andretti, co-owner, with Barry Green, of a four race car team at Motegi including Patrick. Another team member, Andretti's son, Marco, went into the wall seconds after the green flag dropped and the cars were building-up to high speeds. He probably correctly blamed his maneuver on the relatively cold ambient temperature, about 59 degrees F. As soon as the 650-horsepower Honda engine began putting much of its power to the car's rear wheels, the tires spun and Andretti, who just turned 21, was into the wall, happily with no injuries, other than to the car, which kept him from continuing in the event. This is why Formula 1 race cars use electric tire-warming blankets; to keep the tires at a warm, usable and consistent temperature.

The celebration in the grandstands and on the track itself was thrilling for everyone who has followed her Indycar career, which began in 2005, though at times it seems as if Patrick has been around the sport for much longer than that. And it must have come as quite a surprise for many of the Japanese fans who had to wait an extra day for the race. The event was originally slated for Saturday, April 19th, Japanese time, but due to rain and a "weeping" problem on parts of the track (water trapped below the track coming up through the surface), the event was continued to the next day, Sunday, the 20th. After the Saturday race cancellation, it was carried live on ESPN Classic throughout the US, Saturday night US time, and was available on the Indycar.com website (which also carried the Japanese pre-race show feed, which made for fun and interesting viewing for any Americans who were online). (Photo above -- Tony Kanaan placed fifth; Below, Winner Danica Patrick meets the media just minutes after the race).).

Patrick, who turned 26 three weeks ago, won in her 50^th IndyCar Series start. She becomes the 38th winner of Indycar events since the Indy Racing League (IRL) was formed a dozen years ago by Indianapolis Motor Speedway owner Tony George, becoming a break-away league from the then-popular Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART, now known as Champ Car). And as in that "other" Golden Rule, that "he/she who has the money makes the rules", the same applied to Indycar Racing, as in "he/she that owns the Indy race track owns open-wheel racing in the US". Over the last 12 years, sponsors disappeared in droves from US open-wheel racing, spending their bounty instead on NASCAR, and certainly NASCAR's phenomenal growth in the US in the last dozen years perfectly parallels the racing financial disasters called IRL and Champ Car.

Now, with the rapprochement between those series finally in-hand, and this very weekend, in fact, maybe open-wheel racing will give NASCAR a true run for their money, quite literally.

Helio Castroneves, making his 100^th IndyCar Series start at Motegi, finished 5.8594 seconds behind Patrick and Scott Dixon was third. Dixon's Target Chip Ganassi Racing teammate, Dan Wheldon, finished fourth and Tony Kanaan was fifth. (Photo below --- Helio Castroneves, aka "Twinkletoes" for his recent 1st place finish in ABC-TV's "Dancing With the Stars", in the Penske pit area at Motegi alongside teammate Ryan Briscoe).

With only six laps remaining, Dixon had a 3.6-second lead over Dixon. But the leader had to pit for a splash of fuel on Lap 195. Wheldon and Kanaan had to follow suit on Lap 196. That left the door open for Patrick and Castroneves, whose last pit stop came on Lap 148.

Her win occurs as Champ Car is about to be merged into what's now called "Indycar". Tomorrow, April 20th, the 34th Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach will be run, with the event paying points towards a now-combined, single Indycar championship. Because both Champ Car and the IRL has expensive and conflicting contracts with the city of Long Beach, California, and with Twin Ring Motegi, the Japanese race track built and owned by Honda Motor Corporation, officials of both leagues felt that both races had to be run so no contracts would be broken. The Long Beach event is already on Indycar's 2009 schedule; it's not known for certain if the trip to Motegi will happen again next season, though the history-making win which happened at that track today should have Honda and Indycar officials thinking positively about another 15,000 mile round-trip from California to Tokyo and back home again in 2009. (Photo below --- Patrick's husband, left, Paul Hospenthal, shakes hands with team co-owner Michael Andretti after wife Danica's victory in Japan).

Our bet is that Danica Patrick will not be flying back to the US for a few more days, although most other Indycar drivers, teams, officials and others are scheduled to return to the US tomorrow or the next day. Patrick has, no doubt, just two hours after her victory, already become a major celebrity in hero-crazy and American-loving Japan. If she plays her cards right, she'll make more money in this coming week than she has made in her entire racing career. Mark these words!

We were at Motegi shortly after it was opened by Honda in 1997. A small and very old town in the middle of a mountain range about 70 miles north of Tokyo, Motegi's one claim to fame which made it attractive to Honda was that it is somewhat near --- somewhat near --- Honda's gigantic Research and Development facility in the "Science City" of Tochigi. The track itself is difficult to get to for the average Japanese except for locals or without a rock-solid GPS system (or a friend who works there). The best way to visit is to take the train to Utsunomiya Station (which is a Shinkansen, or Bullet Train, station) and then go by bus to Twin Ring Motegi, or by taxi if you have the company credit card (and most taxis in Japan take most credit cards). We would imagine that regular bus service between the track and the train station would run only on racing weekends, so unless you know your way around, it's difficult to not only find this race track on a map, but to get to it, too! (Photo below --- "Victory Circle" is a bit different in Japan at Twin Ring Motegi; in fact, after the race, fans from the grandstands were allowed on the track to snap their own photos ... Imagine trying that in the US ... We'd probably find the race-winning trophy comes up missing!).

The drive, though, is one of the most-beautiful in Japan in almost any season, the narrow two-laner taking one on high metal bridges over rushing rivers, through small farming towns with rice paddies on the limited amount of flat ground and tea growing on terraced hillsides cultivated for hundreds of years, and with the whole trip offering mountain-view vistas at seemingly every turn. Honda officials told us that the company had seriously considered building a train line from Utsunomiya directly to the track, but the process of buying land from literally hundreds, maybe thousands, of land-owners, land which in many cases has been in families for not just generations, but for centuries, was too daunting even for them. (Photo below --- Target/Chip Ganassi driver Dan Wheldon took fourth; teammate Scott Dixon was third).

The main track (or "ring") itself is a 1.5-mile D-shaped oval. But what makes for sometimes fairly boring racing, at least for spectators, is the track's width. Much like Southern California's Auto Club Speedway (formerly California Speedway), it's so wide that cars can complete a 200-lap event without ever needing to be very close to each other. As seen in the race which Patrick was to ultimately win, much of the most-important action takes place in the pits. The facility also has a small hotel and other smaller tracks, including a short road course where one can rent a Honda-made racer called a "side-by-side", which is a small open-wheel racer with a Honda motorcycle engine right next to the driver. And are they WAY fun! (Photo below --- Marco Andretti, who turned 21 last month, slid into the wall on Lap 1 after he spun his too-cold tires when first engaging his car's 650-horsepower Honda "Indy V8" engine).

One great reason to visit the track anytime of the year: It's permanent home to the Honda Museum. Shoichiro Honda was famed not only for his engineering and marketing skills, but for his vision of the future, too, and it's said that he purposely saved two copies of every vehicle he personally ever developed or his company produced, knowing that someday he'd build a museum. From American driver Richie Ginther's F1 race car to the motorcycles made for accompanying the Emperor's motorcade, it's all in that museum. Set aside a full day for the museum and a half-day each for getting to and returning from Motegi. This collection was kept for many years at the Suzuka Race Track, also owned by Honda. But that location, near both Osaka and Nagoya, might have been too far from the company's Tokyo headquarters, or in a too overly-developed area. In either case, the large museum at Motegi is a must-do for Car Nuts. Would you visit Italy and not try to get to the Ferrari Museum, no matter what it took? Of course not! Get more information on Motegi and the museum by clicking anywhere on this line.

There are two other women in Indycar this season, Milka Duno of Caracas, Venezuela, and Sarah Fisher of Commercial Point, Ohio. Duno has been involved in various race series in South America and Europe, and Fisher is a familiar name to many American racing fans, having competed in open-wheel Indy-style events before Patrick. In 1977, Janet Guthrie was the first-ever woman to race in the Indianapolis 500.

Shirley Muldowney, born June 19, 1940 in Schenectady, New York, was the "First Lady of Drag Racing" and the first woman to successfully and consistently race over several years in any form of auto racing, worldwide. She was the first woman to receive a license to drive a top fuel dragster by the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA). She won the NHRA Top Fuel championship in 1977, 1980 and 1982. Actress Bonnie Bedelia was nominated for a Golden Globe Award for her portrayal of Muldowney in the 1983 film, "Heart Like A Wheel". Muldowney's nickname is "Cha-Cha", but I know from personal experience that it is not smart to use that term when speaking to her. (Photo below --- Scott Dixon had a strong podium-finish with his third place).

Danica Patrick was born March 25, 1982 in Roscoe, Illinois. She is married to Paul Hospenthal, and they live in the Phoenix, AZ area. Her husband is a physical therapist, certified strengthening and conditioning specialist, and personal trainer. Paul has trained athletes in all major sports. Paul runs the Desert Institute of Physical Therapy in Scottsdale, Arizona. Paul is a Contributing Writer for "GOLF MAGAZINE" and has been featured in "Sports Illustrated" magazine. He made a VHS video, "17 Pros & The Secrets To Golf Fitness."

Danica lists her hobbies as: Shopping, exercise, yoga, cooking, comedy movies, laughing, travel, and music.

Danica's parents were both with her for the first-ever win in an Indycar race by a woman. They are T.J. and Bev Patrick. T.J. raced skimobiles, motocross, and midget cars. T.J. and Bev met on a blind date at a skimobile event when Bev was a mechanic for a friend's skimobile. They have owned a Java Hut and a plate glass company. Currently, T.J. helps Danica by driving her motor coach, and managing her Web site and merchandise trailer. Bev handles the ins and outs of Danica's business needs, and she might need some help in that area, and soon ... Like, right now!

Though she began racing because her younger sister Brooke wanted to race, Danica Patrick won numerous karting titles. At 16, she left home for England, where raced in some of the most difficult junior series in the world. The highlight was a runner-up finish in the Formula Ford Festival at Brands Hatch, the highest finish by an American in the event's history. That result drew the attention of Indianapolis 500 champion Bobby Rahal, who signed her to a contract and began shepherding Patrick up the racing ladder. Rahal's partner in the race team was television celebrity, and Indianapolis native, David Letterman. (Photo below --- If you were looking for the women from the Tokyo Motor Show, apparently they can be found at Twin Ring Motegi, at least this week. And dig those cra-aa-zy heels!).

The 2005 IndyCar Series season was a banner year for Patrick as she started fourth and finished fourth at the 89^th Indianapolis 500 and earned JP Morgan Chase Rookie of the Year honors. It was the highest starting and finishing position for a woman driver in the event's history. The rookie led 19 laps during the race to become the first woman to lead at Indianapolis. She capped the IndyCar Series season by winning the Bombardier Rookie of the Year Award after finishing 12^th in the standings for Rahal Letterman Racing.

Patrick has become one of the most recognizable female athletes in the United States, gracing the covers of publications such as Sports Illustrated, TV Guide and ESPN: The Magazine. She most recently was featured in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue.