She is woman

hear the crowd roar

Racing: With a real shot, Danica Patrick revs up to make history in the Indianapolis 500 by being the first woman to win the race.

INDIANAPOLIS - This was Danica Patrick at 12.

"She was leading the race, and I was running second," recalls Sam Hornish Jr., who was 15 then and now drives for Team Penske. Hornish is a two-time Indy Racing League champion.

"I went to pass her. She tried to block me, but I was already there," he said.

Their go-karts collided. Hers flew off the track. To this day, neither will accept blame.

She returned to the race with Hornish in the cross hairs of those dark eyes that can blaze with purpose.

"On the last lap, she went into the last corner and drove right over the top of me," Hornish remembers. "She went upside down. It took us both out."

Score settled.

Now is her time. The 89th running of the Indianapolis 500 is tomorrow, and Patrick, 23, is a sudden star of Indy. She is arguably the best female driver ever.

"How does it look to have a beautiful lady like that outrunning you?" A.J. Foyt, the icon of Indy, asked his grandson, a third-year driver, the other day.

A. J. Foyt IV replies, "It's kind of embarrassing."

Maybe not if one goes back to the go-kart incident and what happened after that, when Patrick got tough.

That was before she crossed the Atlantic, alone at 16, to be steeled as a racer in the "schooling formulas" of Europe, the ruthless prep leagues for drivers from all over the world who aspire to Formula One.

It was before "England changed me," she says.

But even at 12, racing go-karts out of her hometown of Roscoe, Ill., up by the Wisconsin line, "I knew about the Indy 500," she says, "and I thought, `That's what I'm going to do one day.'"

"I think at 12, she was dreaming; at 13, she knew," says her mother, Bev.

And the other Indy drivers know that only one split-second move of her car, in qualifying, kept her from being the first woman to win the pole for the Indianapolis 500.

"I don't know if it was my mistake or not," she says. "Whether or not there was an itty-bitty gust of wind, or whether or not the tires were up to temp [warm enough for proper grip on the track], only God knows."

Whatever happened dropped her first lap to 224.920 mph and her four-lap average to 227.004. The average of her other three laps, 227.707, would have knocked veteran Tony Kanaan off the pole.

As it is, Kanaan's four-lap average of 227.566 holds for the top starting spot.

Still, Patrick will start fourth, best for a woman here, bettering the sixth-place start of Lyn St. James in 1994.

The pure driver, regardless of gender, is "very good; she's doing an excellent job," says Rick Mears, a retired four-time Indy winner who serves as driver coach for Team Penske and chief scout of the competition, which includes the rival Rahal-Letterman team for which Patrick drives.

Even tough Foyt, long a hanging judge of young drivers, is impressed.

"She's a beautiful girl, a very nice girl, and she's doing a hell of a job," Foyt says. "I don't care if you're a boy or a girl - you've got to take your hat off to her. I think she's great."

Foyt adds, "She's waking up some of these little deadheads," referring to his blanket judgment of the majority of current-generation drivers.

But here's what mists the hardened eyes of Foyt: In a realm now dominated by imported drivers, Patrick - listed as 5 feet 2 and 100 pounds, although on local TV the other night she admitted, "I'm five-nothing" - is pure Midwestern American.

An atypically beaming Foyt says, "I'm very proud of her."

Though her stardom may be sudden, "she's earned every bit of it," says her father, T.J., who put her in go-karts at age 10 and realized his daughter was a serious competitor.

The family racing background is hands-on, grassroots. T.J. is a former motocross and skimobile racer, and he also drove midget cars. He and Bev met on a blind date at a skimobile event where "I was a mechanic for a girl who raced," Bev says.

By 15, Danica, a go-kart champ, was so serious about racing that she wanted to move on to the most challenging form available to her. Ford Motor Co. racing moguls, whose eyes she had caught, suggested she go abroad to the schooling formulas.

Late in her junior year of high school, off she went, alone. The family had no reservations about it. "Not at all," T.J says. "You couldn't crush her dream."

At first, she had the financial support of a wealthy Texas family interested in racing, and three-time world Formula One champion Jackie Stewart and his son Paul oversaw her progress. However after the first year, Paul Stewart fell seriously ill, and the financial backing stopped.

"It was a tough three years," T.J. says.

Just in time, IndyCar team owner Bobby Rahal, the 1986 winner of the 500, arrived in England for a brief stint as head of the Jaguar F1 team.

"What impressed me about her was the degree to which she would go to race, in terms of living a long way from home, as a very young girl, by herself," Rahal says. "It's tough. Your mom's not there; your dad's not there; your friends aren't there.