Danica Patrick the target of harsh ‘standards’ dig by former Red Bull man

Former Red Bull engineer Blake Hinsey has criticised Danica Patrick and her role in the difficulty associated with attracting new fans to endurance racing.

Patrick, the former IndyCar and NASCAR racer, has regularly appeared as a pundit across an array of motorsport broadcasts since her racing career came to a close in 2018.

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The 43-year-old, who famously became the first female winner of an IndyCar race in 2008, is a divisive figure among fans.

Following her racing career, which included a start in the 24 Hours of Daytona, she became an expert voice at the Indianapolis 500 in 2019.

Patrick joined the Sky F1 team for the first time at the 2021 United States Grand Prix in Austin, Texas, with the Wisconsin native now a familiar face on the broadcaster’s coverage.

She has also covered a variety of different forms of motor racing as a pundit, including endurance racing.

It’s her role within the broadcast of longer-form racing for which she has come under fire.

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Taking to Twitter, Hinsey, who spent more than seven years at Red Bull between 2014 and 2021 after a spell with the Force India (now Aston Martin) team before becoming an internet personality, has criticised the broadcast coverage of endurance racing.

And he could not resist a dig at Patrick, revealing he “immediately” turns the coverage off when she appears on screen.

He wrote: “I think endurance racing (and all other championships) are missing so much on the broadcasts.

“There are a few things that I usually see that go a few different ways:

“1) Imagine someone’s asked you to come to a party because it’s awesome, and it looks awesome.

“No one talks to you, no one acknowledges you’re there, and all of the conversations no one bothers to explain what’s going on because they are all mates anyways.

“2) HEHE RACECAR VroORorooom

“3) The commentators have no clue what’s going on and are bulls****ing the whole way through and every ten minutes tell you ‘oh wow these hybirds [sic] are cool’ or ‘such technology wow!’ (which is basically the same as 2)

“4) Danica Patrick is on the broadcast so you immediately turn it off, because you have standards.

“I know I’m an engineer (or something) and I consume things differently than a lot of people, but I think there are some common threads between me wanting to enjoy a race I’m not working and my dad, who likes turning on a race now and then, but he won’t come back because it’s so far up it’s [sic] own ass and nuanced to get that interested.

“People are extremely visual.

“The timing towers on the side of the screen are garbage (F1 and Indycar are notoriously bad) (the energy meter in WEC is pretty useful actually).

“But for endurance races, EXPLAIN the strategy and the gambles visually.

“I have to use graphical means to show my dumb brain how strategy is likely to play out, and I do this more or less every day.

“Use some graphics to explain how the race has unfolded and how people have gotten to where they are at HOUR TWELVE in the race.

“Use some graphics to show the pace of different cars and drivers and how that’s had an impact.

“Give the people a better reason to watch longer! Or give them a better way to understand what happened in the race.

“For the dude that’s watching F1 and can’t get into endurance racing. I get it… but if they’d explain more of this stuff and how it works, more people would buy in.

“But the cost of admission is just a bit more, but the broadcast and supplementary content is so poor in this area, you’re just going to have to rely on ‘2) hehehehEHeh RaceCaR’ which isn’t a useful method for growing the fanbase.”

Endurance racing covers a broad spectrum of disciplines, with the World Endurance Championship the most well known.

However, several key events exist outside of that competition, such as the Daytona 24 Hours, which is part of the American IMSA SportsCar Championship, and the 24 Hours of Spa, a GT3-led event which falls under the GT World Challenge umbrella.

That variety is complicated further by the class structure contained within, with driver rankings and balance of performance measures used to equalise what are, in essence, markedly different cars and drivers ranging from amateurs to world champions.

As such, it’s become a niche style of racing, traditionally followed by a subset of hardcore fans.

However, current regulations in the World Endurance Championship have sparked an explosion of interest in the category with the likes of Ferrari tempted back to the sport’s top class.

That follows a sustained growth spurt that has seen GT3 racing become the dominant form of national and regional endurance racing, outside of the United States where the IMSA series – essentially a national derivative of WEC – is the leading competition.

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