Danica Patrick is racing in Florida this weekend, but not with the good ol' boys of the NASCAR Nationwide series. Interested? If the answer is a resounding yes, I'm guessing you already have plans to attend the Honda Grand Prix of St. Petersburg, a full IndyCar weekend with the main event scheduled Sunday afternoon on a flashy waterfront street course not far from Tropicana Field. If not, consider it evidence of a fairly obvious Danica disconnect. She still wants to win the Indy 500 more than anything else, but the unchanging truth is that America has a bigger, longer-lasting crush on NASCAR. She's bright enough to get that, and when Patrick returns to stock cars in late June, she'll get the spotlight back, too. The St. Pete race is on ABC, and that's so much better than the Indy Racing League's season opener at Sao Paulo on March 14. Stuck with limited audience potential on the Versus network, that race drew about 411,000 viewers. Not bad, but Patrick's stock-car debut in a February ARCA support race at Daytona International Speedway grabbed 2.4 million viewers on the Speed network. What's more, the NASCAR Sprint Cup drivers took the weekend of the Sao Paulo race off, providing a perfect window of opportunity for the open-wheelers to clean up with race fans. They didn't. There's just no comparison. Patrick finished 15th with a rainy spinout at Sao Paulo and earned no big headlines in the U.S. for her efforts. She wasn't even the first female driver across the finish line. Rookie Ana Beatriz Figueiredo, one of four women in the field, got there before Patrick. On the other hand, Patrick received obsessive television coverage for her Nationwide finishes -- 35th place at Daytona, 31st at California and 36th at Las Vegas. When she left the track with a crumpled car at Daytona, there were more reporters shoving and pushing for a quote at her garage than there were to meet the race winner, whoever the heck that was. All right, all right, I know that Tony Stewart won the Drive4COPD 300 that afternoon. Just making a point. Even with the swimsuit magazine shoots and the racy GoDaddy television commercials and a gigantic, new billboard on the side of a Times Square skyscraper, Patrick needs to sign up for something much closer to a full NASCAR schedule next year, with her Indy career playing out more like a part-time gig. It's a relationship that can't help but work. Dave George writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: dave(underscore)george@pbpost.com. 