Full Throttle

Milka Duno will join fellow IndyCar Series driver Danica Patrick at next week’s ARCA test at Daytona International Speedway.

Duno will drive a stock car for the first time at the test. It will be a Toyota owned by Braun Racing, which is the most successful independent team in NASCAR’s second-tier Nationwide Series.

Team owner Todd Braun says if Duno wants to ever try NASCAR, the first step is an ARCA test. He gave no indication on whether he would field a car for Duno in an ARCA or NASCAR event.

Have I fallen into some type of time/space continuum and transported from Christmas time to April Fools Day?

Milkalicious in a stock car?

She’s a smart gal, must be with 4 master’s degrees in Organizational Development, Naval Architecture, Fishing and Aquaculture and Maritime Business but her IRL career has been, to be kind, less than stellar.

In her thus far three years of IRL competition she’s scored no podiums and no top tens, although to be fair the teams she’s driven for SAMAX her rookie year and Dreyer & Reinbold the last two years have stunk on ice. And the race track.

She’s has had some successes scoring a 2nd place finish in the 2007 24 Hours of Daytona and an 8th place finish the year before. She also was 5th in Rolex Driver Point Standings in 2004 with 2 Wins, 5 Top-Five Finishes and 10 Top-Ten Finishes.

Duno has scored a number of other “firsts” as both a woman and as a Latina woman in her career but it’s her time in IndyCar that has drawn the wrath of many of her fellow competitors in the series.

She’s been called a “rolling chicane” by some and a few have gone so far as to say shes “dangerous.” I’ll leave that for the drivers to kibbutz over and just say she hasn’t set the IRL world on fire.

She set Danica “on fire,” as the video shows, but I digress.

I’ll leave with this final thought: Milka is every bit the, ahem…. woman that Danica is but hardly causes a ripple from those that decry some of Patrick’s photo spreads. Photos that show no more than what’s seen on every beach in America I might add.

When Duno first arrived at Indy in 2007 never having seen the glamorous Venezuelan behind the wheel of an Indy car hundreds of mostly young men lined up to get Milka Duno’s autograph that first Saturday.

Since then not much “buzz,” for the lack of a better term, of the type Danica receives has surrounded Milka.

I don’t get the difference, and probably never will.

Regardless, like any driver branching out I hope she does well in this test and whatever comes of it.