As 16 drivers begin the quest for the NASCAR championship this weekend in suburban Chicago, Danica Patrick and her Stewart-Haas Racing No. 10 team will try to figure out why they've lost the momentum that had them talking the Chase early in the year.
Eight races into the season, Patrick was 13th in the standings with two top-10 finishes and all but four laps completed. She would have made the playoffs had the season ended then. Since then, she has slowly sunk to a season-low 24th in the rankings with no more top-10 finishes and not even a top 15 since late May.
Patrick continues to make history as the only woman to compete full-time in stock car racing's top level, and she has shown enough progress -- combined with her marketing appeal -- to land a new sponsor and contract extension with Stewart Haas. Still, she is stuck in a slump that neither she, crew chief Daniel Knost nor Stewart-Haas competition director Greg Zipadelli can fully quantify.
"Part of it is something I just can't answer," Patrick said during a school appearance last week in Virginia. "I don't know if they know either. I know to be good in Cup, you have to be extremely good in all areas. You have to have good cars, good engines, make good decisions on your setup every weekend, have good changes during the weekends, have smart races, no mistakes. There are a lot of things that go into a good weekend. I wish I could tell you what it is because we would fix it quickly."
What seems obvious is that Patrick and Knost, paired together with three races to go last season, haven't jelled the way it looked as if they would early this year.
Knost, a Ph.D. mechanical engineer, is in his second full season as a crew chief, and Patrick is in her third year as a full-time Sprint Cup driver after coming from the IndyCar series. They're relatively new, and -- Zipadelli notes -- their learning curve has been steepened by repeated changes NASCAR has made to the cars since the end of last season.
The rules, of course, are the same for everybody, and Patrick and Knost have struggled together.
"They don't seem to be able to go back [to a track they've been to previously] ... and pick up where they left off," Zipadelli said. "They seem to almost start over a lot of times. Daniel is still learning, Danica is still learning. I wish it was easier because we all certainly wish they were a little more consistent. Honestly, they just haven't a rhythm."
About their communication after 29 races together, Zipadelli says: "Some days it seems, man, they're getting it, and other days it's frustrating as hell because they seem like they're on completely different pages, to be honest with you."
Knost says the team's execution has slipped since early in the season, when they were staying out of trouble on the track and making decisions late in the races that allowed Patrick to pick up extra positions.
Indeed, it seems like there has been something every week. From running out of fuel, to hitting the wall to some late-race calls that haven't panned out.
"I feel like we have had good speed at times and we continue to build better and better cars,'' Knost said, "but one of the things we did really well at the beginning of the year was we didn't take ourselves out, so we generally finished around where we were running. And during the middle stretch of the year, we haven't done that as well.''
Knost also says the uncertainly about whether Patrick was going to come back -- she was in the final year of her contract, and sponsor GoDaddy announced in late April that it wouldn't return in 2016 -- was "detrimental during the middle of the year."
Last month, Stewart-Haas announced it had signed Patrick to a contract extension and Nature's Bakery would be the primary sponsor in 2016. On Friday, Aspen Dental announced it would increase its sponsorship of Patrick from two races a year to four races annually.
"...I think it was a distraction," Knost said. "I believe we've done a little better. I believe team morale has been a little better since they announced the new agreement. Hopefully, we can go and have a strong run through the Chase and set ourselves up with some momentum for next year."
Patrick is not so new to NASCAR that she hasn't been to every track at least two times and some as many as six or seven. Drivers are expected to break out by their third year and show they belong, and since Patrick has reached that point of her career, she's been subjected to extra scrutiny this year.
Zipadelli, a two-time championship crew chief with Tony Stewart, is pointed in assessing her progress.
"Some weekends it's great, and other weekends it's not," he said. "The consistency is lacking -- her consistency, their consistency, however you want to look at it. I really think they should run 12th to 15th every single week. If they could do that, they'd end up with top 10s. And then they'd end up with better finishes."
Without question, the resources are in place for Patrick. Stewart-Haas has two drivers in the Chase in defending series champion Kevin Harvick and Kurt Busch and two on the outside in Patrick and team co-owner Stewart, who hasn't been the same since he struck and fatally injured sprint car driver Kevin Ward Jr. in 2014.
Harvick and Busch have combined for six wins and 19 top-5 finishes, even though Busch missed the first three races because of legal problems.
Zipadelli acknowledges it defies explanation that half of the four-car Stewart Haas team could be in championship form and half could be outside the top 20.
"We don't treat the 10 (Patrick) any different than the 14 (Stewart) or the 4 (Harvick),'' he said. "Everybody gets as many new cars and parts and pieces that they need.
"But at the end of the day, you have to have people that are able to (bond). You look at the 41 (Busch) last year versus this year, and that was just swapping some people. It's a whole different deal now. Their consistency, their speed, their performance is way better than it was a year ago. ... So there is something to the chemistry, and there is something in believing in each other and building on that."
The switch was Knost going from Busch's team to Patrick's and savvy veteran Tony Gibson leaving Patrick for Busch seven races into the Chase. Busch and Gibson immediately took off, posting three top-11 finishes in the final three races last year. Patrick and Knost struggled to finishes of 27th, 42nd and 19th before starting strong this year.
No one denies that Gibson, with his decades of experience and seat-of-the-pants feel for how to set up a race car, may have been a better match for Patrick. Even so, Zipadelli says Stewart-Haas has never looked back.
"It made one team a lot stronger, and one kind of stayed where it was," he said. "I think it probably hurt Danica because I felt like they were making some progress. But to be honest, she had some (solid) first races (her rookie season), and I guess she should have made more progress than what she had. So it's just sometimes you have to do things. So that was one of the ones we had to do."
Knost's challenge over the final 10 races is to give Patrick a feel in the car she wants and hasn't been able to get consistently. It's a daunting challenge, for sure, because Sprint Cup cars are notoriously difficult to drive.
Zipadelli says the feel Patrick is looking for "sometimes isn't there." Knost says he's using all of his engineering tricks to find it.
"I don't know that anything is impossible to provide," Knost said. "But one thing I've learned about most drivers is that if they don't feel the racing in the seat or the steering wheel or whatever, it becomes a limitation. ... With Danica, it seems we really have to work on having a stable platform. I don't think we've always achieved that."
What seems certain is that Patrick and Knost will have 10 more races to try to make it work. Zipadelli said he doesn't expect any late-season switches like last year's, and he believes Patrick and Knost can do better together.
Patrick says she's game.
"I think there still things we have to work on," she said. "The things we have to work on together are things that I am better and worse at and he is better and worse at. But the point is, we're both kind of young in our jobs in NASCAR compared to many. So that's the challenge."