I did a story this week on Danica Patrick, the perky little race driver. Her contract with Andretti Green, an Indy Racing League team, is up this year, and speculation is rife that she will jump to NASCAR, which is far more popular than the IRL … on the order of 10 to 50 times more popular.

Anyway, see that story here, in the New York Times.

In the course of reporting the Danica story, I talked to Janet Guthrie, women’s motor racing pioneer, and someone I had last spoken to 33 years ago.

And she had some interesting things to say.

Guthrie was ahead of her time. It was the mid-1970s, and women’s rights were an issue, and everybody knew what the word “feminist” meant … but women really hadn’t quite broken through in many areas of endeavor.

Motor racing certainly was not one of them.

Then along came Janet Guthrie, a very bright (electrical engineer), very ambitious woman with a background in sports cars and flying … who wanted to race at Indy and bang fenders in NASCAR.

Turns out, she was good. Operating with second-tier equipment, most of the time, and with sketchy teams, more often than not, she managed some very solid results. A ninth at the Indy 500. A fifth in the Milwaukee Indycar race. A sixth in a NASCAR race at Bristol.

I called Guthrie, who lives in Aspen, Colo., re-introduced myself, told her I had done a long Q&A with her more than 30 years ago before a race at Ontario Motor Speedway (long since torn down) … and, of course, she didn’t remember me. She did a lot of interviews back then, some of them with guys who didn’t think she ought to be driving and might pose a threat to everyone specifically because of her gender.

Anyway, I called Guthrie, now 71, to talk about Danica Patrick, and ask Guthrie what advice she might have for Patrick.

“My advice won’t be very original,” Guthrie said. “She should stay where she is. She is in the best possible situation in IRL, and recent history has a lot of examples of very successful IRL drivers who have tripped over their own feet in NASCAR.”

But wouldn’t Patrick be missing a chance to make a lot more money, in NASCAR? Isn’t it a more lucrative place to be driving, and shouldn’t those factors be paramount? “All other things being equal, they would be,” Guthrie said. “Maybe I’m just basing it on my own experience, but money was the last thing I ever thought of. I wanted to race where the most competition and prestige was.”

What sort of situation would Patrick need, in NASCAR, to succeed? “She would have to sign herself to an equally competitive team in NASCAR, and that team would have to be prepared to give her a small number of years to become familiar with that venue of racing. … At the time I was driving, I’m pretty sure it was Benny Parsons who said it would take five years in NASCAR to become a winner, and that was 1977, and I believe it would be even longer now.”

So, she should stay in the IRL? “Where she is now, Danica is in the catbird seat. She’s in one of the few teams that are capable of winning. She has (team owner) Michael Andretti as her own personal race director …”

Would Danica, as a woman, be a big boost to NASCAR’s appeal? Guthrie was the only expert I talked to who thought the answer would be “no”.

“I think the shock that a woman could be competitive in that venue has dissipated,” she said, suggesting that she had seen to that shock three decades ago, “and I think the shock of it was when people went to see the races I ran in. … And I did hold my head up, for a new, one-car team, with hardly the highest financing and zero industry connections.”

She didn’t leave the limelight because she was tired with it. She never really got the sponsorship necessary to be competitive, and within a few years, she was off the grid. “I wish with all my heart I had been able to continue. … I would have walked over hot coals barefoot for a chance to continue.”

Guthrie was already 38 when she got a chance to run in the big events. She wasn’t young and cute, and no one asked her to model a bikini, as Sports Illustrated has the past two years of Patrick, who accepted the invitation. Not that she would have agreed to it.

She considered herself a serious person … and still does … and feminists in that earlier era considered the idea of trading on their looks as part of the old way of things, a form of selling out. Turns out, many women who appear in what are called “men’s magazines” apparently now believe there is no sexism involved … and that they are manipulating the men who are paying them to wear few (or no) clothes.

Guthrie hasn’t bought into that modern approach to feminism and modeling. Few women of her generation did. Asked about Danica Patrick appearing in the SI swimsuit editions, Guthrie said, “It certainly hasn’t hurt her in Indycar racing. Like many people I really regret seeing those soft-porn photos that will be around forever on the Web. But if that’s what she wants to do, it’s worked for her. … She made, what, $7 million last year?”

And, it turns out, Guthrie isn’t quite rooting for Danica Patrick. But she is for another, lesser-known driver who makes occasional appearances at the Indianapolis 500 — Sarah Fisher.

“What I really wish is that Sarah Fisher could find the funding for a full-time ride in the IRL. She’s the one who first qualified on the pole in an Indycar race, and had a second-place finish. I always thought she would be the first to win an Indycar race.”

She also made note that she has written a book (it’s on the home page of her Web site, which you can find here.) It is, she said, “a book that took me 20 years to write.”

After I was finished talking to Guthrie, it struck me how what happens to so many of us is circumscribed by the place and the circumstances and the time we are born.

Janet Guthrie was born about 40 years too soon. If she were Danica Patrick’s age, I am fairly confident she would be beating her like a drum.