Danica Patrick: The 'Go Daddy Girl' pays Cedar Rapids-Hiawatha a visit. With videos.

HIAWATHA - A throng of Go Daddy employees gathered in their workplace Thursday to see and hear the star of many of their company's commercials and advertisements.

Danica Patrick knows the value of having a good relationship with a sponsor in auto racing. Five years after becoming a spokeswoman for the Web hosting firm, she made her first appearance at the Go Daddy facility here.

She answered questions about her favorite food (eggs), how many speeding tickets she's gotten (a lot), and, of course, racing.

She also talked about that sponsor thing, after she was asked if she knew Cedar Rapids native Landon Cassill of the NASCAR Sprint Cup series.

“I know Landon really well,” Patrick said. “He's a great kid. He actually helped me as a driving coach last year at a (NASCAR Nationwide Series) race. He's a good driver.”

Cassill is coming off a splendid Cup career-best 12th-place finish at Michigan for a Phoenix Racing team that doesn't have nearly the operating budget of, say, those Patrick drives for on the IndyCar and Nationwide circuits.

“It's just hard to get everything to happen all at once,” Patrick said. “To find a good team, to get a good ride, to have a sponsor to go along with it, and then have things happen for you like finishing well so you can keep moving forward and keep building the momentum.

“But sponsorship is definitely the hardest thing these days.”

Finding sponsors for her racing teams has never been a problem for Patrick in her seven-year IndyCar career, nor has landing side work doing endorsements. Which is pretty good for someone who has one win in 105 IndyCar starts, that coming three years ago in Japan. She has 48 Top Tens.

Patrick will compete Saturday night in Newton at the Iowa Corn Indy 250 at Iowa Speedway. She is coming off her highest finish of the season, a fifth-place showing Sunday in Milwaukee. She was 10th in this year's Indianapolis 500, her sixth Top Ten in seven Indys.

Besides running a full-time IndyCar schedule, Patrick is in her second year of running a select schedule of NASCAR events. In five races on that circuit this year, she has a pair of Top Tens including a fourth-place result at Las Vegas. Which is markedly better from her rookie season, when her best finish in 13 starts was 19th.

Thursday, she was asked for the thousandth time about which kind of racing she would focus on in the future. She gave her pat answer, which is that she doesn't know.

“After racing in NASCAR for a while now,” Patrick said, “it reminds me of being younger and racing go-carts at Marshalltown, Iowa (in 1997). Even there terminology they use is like racing go-carts again. The people are all American.

“It shows me how European IndyCar racing is. It's a bit colder environment, maybe. Everybody's a little bit more selfish, It takes a little while longer to get in with people and be friends with people.

“Where in NASCAR, it's ‘Come on over and have a beer.' The two series are just a little bit different.”