It's unfortunate the sixth win for 51-year-old ARCA veteran Bobby Gerhart at Daytona International Speedway will be mostly an afterthought, with the central question surrounding Saturday's Lucas Oil Slick Mist 200 being, “So, how did Danica do?”

Pretty well, all things considered. The Indy Racing League driver, making her stock-car racing debut ahead of a 12- or 13-race schedule in NASCAR's Nationwide series, finished a solid sixth after being shuffled back as far as 24th in the caution-plagued 80-lap race. Patrick was running well up in the pack when, on lap 48, she was shuffled up the track in turn two--possibly, Patrick said, by a bump from a car behind her--and she lost the lead-pack draft.

As she was working her way back up, she tried to pass former Formula One driver Nelson Piquet Jr., coming onto the front straight for lap 53, when Piquet moved low and hit Patrick, sending her into the infield grass. She saved the car and ended up on pit road, but she had to make several pit stops to change tires and adjust a steering problem. But she remained on the lead lap. “Then I thought, ‘Shoot, we're not out of this, right? Why would we be out of it?' ” she said after the race.

Patrick was one of six female drivers in the 43-car field and finished the highest, though Daytona Beach-native Alli Owens ran as high as third for much of the race until mechanical problems and a late-race spin dropped her far down in the field into 23rd.

Second was Mark Thompson and third was John Wes Townley. James Buescher, the defending champion and pole sitter for this race, was fourth, and Patrick Sheltra was fifth, one year after a grinding late-race crash totaled his car and sent him to the hospital with two broken vertebrae.

Piquet, the former Renault F1 driver attempting to transition to stock cars, was 27th.

The race had two red-flag periods for crashes, the most serious involving Iowa racer Jill George, driving veteran James Hylton's car. She hit the front stretch wall hard, just past the safer barrier, and while she emerged from the car under her own power, the race was stopped while the damaged fence and wall were repaired. And on lap 58, Maryland driver Barry Fitzgerald flipped six times on the backstretch but was treated at and released from the infield hospital.

The biggest crash occurred on lap seven, when Florida driver Bill Baird, driving NASCAR veteran Ken Schrader's car, crashed into the car of Kentucky driver Steve Blackburn in turn two, collecting eight other cars, including those of open-wheel drivers Milka Duno and Leilani Munter. Aside from Patrick, the next-highest finishing female driver, Jennifer Jo Cobb, an experienced Kansas City racer, finished 17th, on the lead lap.

As for Gerhart, the Pennsylvania veteran is easily the most successful racer at Daytona of all the ARCA regulars--he has one victory at Talladega Super Speedway, and now six at Daytona, including a string of three in 2005, 2006 and 2007--but none at any of the other ARCA tracks. He took the lead early, and good pit strategy kept him in front, though there was a concern about whether he had the fuel to finish, since he made it 65 laps from the last stop to the finish.

Patrick was clearly pleased with her race, as was her Dale Earnhardt Jr.-owned JR Racing team, though she has not yet said whether she will make her NASCAR debut her next Saturday, or in California the week after.

“At the beginning we were just hanging out, and there were a lot of yellows obviously,” Patrick said. Later, “The car just kind of started sliding around a bit more.” One possible reason: Her crew did not change tires during her first pit stop, and other teams did.

“That was really fun running side-by-side with people,” Patrick said. “But it didn't look very pretty.”

Even Gerhart was happy with the attention Patrick brought to ARCA. “I'm glad she was here,” he said. “She brought some well-needed attention to this series.”

ARCA , he said, consists of a “hard-core group of talented racers who drive their guts out,” and “I welcome the opportunity to have a national platform to compete at. Maybe from now on when somebody says ARCA, they won't say, ‘What?'”

From Daytona, the Ohio-based ARCA series moves down Interstate 95 to a new race at Palm Beach International Raceway's road course on Feb. 27. It will be the first ARCA race where both former NASCAR Sprint Cup cars and the shorter Nationwide Series cars will be allowed on the same track.