The Danica question is garage gossip at most NASCAR stops. This weekend, it's Pocono Raceway's turn.

Will Danica Patrick, in the final year of her contract with the Andretti Green Indy-car team, speed over to NASCAR?

Patrick has left the gate to NASCAR open. She recently visited several Sprint Cup team shops. Previously, she said she is "collecting information. The most important thing for me is to put myself in a situation where I can win as many races as possible and run up front."

Although she has just one Indy-car victory, Patrick has star power. If Patrick makes the move, she needs to be with a top NASCAR team. Many observers recommend that she race in the Nationwide series for a year before moving up to Cup.

Moving from the faster, lighter Indy cars to the heavier Sprint Cup cars is daunting. Lately, Juan Pablo Montoya is the only former open-wheel racer who has run up front. Sam Hornish Jr., in his second Sprint Cup season, has not made an impact. Dario Franchitti returned to Indy cars after team owner Chip Ganassi folded his Cup team.

H.A. "Humpy" Wheeler, the former president and general manager of Lowe's Motor Speedway, is among the skeptics who doubt Patrick will leave Indy cars.

"I think it's going to be tough to make that happen," Wheeler said earlier this week from Charlotte, N.C. "But, money talks. If some [owner] has lost his sponsor and can't get another one, and somebody says, 'If you put Danica in the car we'll give you $15 million,' there's no question what he's going to do.

"I know Goodyear is working on a wider tire. If they had a wider tire and they slowed the cars down, it would make them easier to drive. That might be the thing that would tip the deal [for her]."

Should Patrick switch to NASCAR, Wheeler said earlier that he would enjoy handling the race. A master promoter, Wheeler is now president of The Wheeler Company, an event and motorsports management firm.

"She would stir it up," Wheeler said in a Speed channel interview.

Reaching into his promoter's file, Wheeler said, "I know Janet Guthrie did when we had her for the first time at Charlotte in the 1976 Coca-Cola 600. We sold every ticket out. We sold more tickets in one day when she made the starting field than we've ever sold in one day."

NASCAR can use some positive news. Attendance was significantly off at this month's races at Indianapolis and Daytona. Allstate has withdrawn as the sponsor of the Brickyard 400 at Indy. General Motors is cutting back its funding in NASCAR.

Wheeler advises NASCAR to look beyond the battered economy as a major reason for the decline in attendance.

"When a sport creates a lot of new fans, the most difficult thing to do is keep them," he said. "What happens on the race track has more to do with it than anything. If you have dull baseball games, sooner or later people will lose interest.

"Too many guys are racing for points. I've never seen a fan buy a ticket to a points race. You need a points race, but you need to gear it to leading and winning.

"Double-file restarts will help, but when races run 3 hours you need excitement the whole time. If movies weren't exciting or entertaining from start to finish theaters would die."

Sustaining 3 hours of excitement in Cup races isn't realistic. Maybe 2 1/2 hours though, with more passing for the leads, would bring back more fans.

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