After two years with Rahal Letterman, Patrick moved into one of IRL’s elite stables, Andretti Green Racing, which employs drivers like Tony Kanaan, Dario Franchitti and Dan Wheldon (until he bolted for Ganassi after the 2005 season). Patrick and Marco Andretti fill out the current lineup.

Of AGR’s four current drivers, only Patrick has yet to record a win. Andretti, in his second season, had a win and seven top 10s last year. Kanaan has nine career wins (a win and 14 other top-fives since 2006) and Franchitti has six (with a win and eight top fives since ’06).

So equipment has not been the problem for Patrick, at least not compared to her teammates. In her first season with AGR — eight races so far — she has one top five finish and one start better than fifth.

Certainly, incidents have played a part; her dust-up with Wheldon at Milwaukee left her with equipment issues, and she was relegated to an eighth-place finish after holding fourth at the time of the incident. She confronted Wheldon on pit road, and the issue has largely faded in the intervening weeks.

A win is a lofty goal, certainly; Patrick and the IRL will certainly benefit if she’s able to pull that off.

But it seems at the moment a better consistency is more critical. At the moment, she’s fourth on a four-driver team.

• WHAT EXACTLY CONSTITUTES cheating?

Seems like a pretty easy definition, no? You break the rules, you cheat. Pretty simple.

So where, then, is the line between cheating and innovation?

Two well-respected NASCAR writers went looking for the line, and found it in very different places. In the wake of penalties for Hendrick Motorsports’ top two teams, David Poole of the Charlotte Observer took a hard line, particularly as it related to crew chiefs Steve Letarte and Chad Knaus.

A few days later, Ed Hinton from the Orlando Sentinel counters (in an admittedly more general argument) that were it not for the ‘innovation’ of crew members past, NASCAR would be nowhere near as popular as it is today.

Both make very good points. Poole cites the passage in the NASCAR rulebook that the Hendrick teams violated; the language was released by NASCAR, since their rulebooks aren’t available to the public. Hinton says NASCAR’s zero-tolerance policy on COT modifications only generate more negative publicity for the sport, particularly when its biggest stars (Dale Earnhardt Jr., Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson) are swept up in the melee.

In a perfect world, Poole’s vision is the ideal one. Everyone works to the letter of the law, making the very best car they can squarely within the confines of the rulebook — a utopian vision if ever there was one.

But Hinton seems to represent what works best in a very imperfect world. With all the money floating around NASCAR these days — and the pressure that comes with it — it seems to take a certain (rather high) level of naiveté to believe that people won’t push hard against the boundaries.

I do reject the argument that just because people have always tried to cheat in NASCAR that it should be OK today. It shouldn’t be. But I also think that the argument, as stated, doesn’t do the whole discussion justice.

It’s like the old adage that Poole explicitly and Hinton indirectly cite: If you ain’t cheatin’, you ain’t tryin’. It’s a succinct expression, certainly, but it also glosses over some real-world issues; namely, where is the boundary between cheatin’ and tryin’?

Right now, we know where the boundary is. NASCAR is not going to allow any sort of modifications to the COT, period. Nextel Cup series director John Darby, in Hinton’s story, said that the violations that got Earnhardt and the Hendrick drivers penalized might not have been such a big deal with the old model. So template modifications on the COT are an absolute no-no.

But what if some inventive crew chief or engineer finds a way to push the envelope on something that won’t be seen by the templates?

Where does the line fall then?

• JUST A REMINDER THAT we’ll be taking some time off. We’ll be back in 10 days or so — July 11 or so. OK, so that’s more than 10 days. Give me a break, I’m tired, even after that venti mocha from Starbucks.

But it all plays in with my strategy. As a night owl (usual bedtime: 2 a.m.), tonight is not going to work so well with my sleep pattern, considering we fly out of BWI at 6:30. Doing some backwards math, that means being at the airport by 5, leaving our apartment around 4:15, getting up around 2:30.

So I’ve skimped on sleep the past two days to ensure I’ll be plenty tired for an early evening nap. That hopefully gives me enough ammo to stay up through the night and snooze on the plane for the first leg to Fabulous Las Vegas. (If any of you share my avaition geekiness — hey, you never know — I’ve done the research and, barring unusual weather, am expecting the TERPZ1 departure out of BWI and the TYSSN1 arrival into Las Vegas; from there, I figure on the SHEAD5 departure out of Vegas and the MOXEE6 arrival into Portland. Please note these links are all PDFs.)

So there you have it. Twelve days. And it only took me three paragraphs to figure it out.

(Photo by Tony Gutierrez/Associated Press)