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Danica Patrick will take any sign of improvement she can get as she continues her stock-car education.

So she was smiling Friday afternoon after a practice session that was better than she performed at Richmond International Raceway last September. Patrick finished the 150-minute session ranked ninth among Nationwide Series drivers at the .75-mile track and qualified 16th for the race Friday night.

Last September, in her first trip to the track, Patrick was 35th in practice. The rest of her weekend didn’t get much better as she started the race 32nd and finished 18th.

“Staying inside the top 10 in practice was a really good thing for me,” Patrick said. “Hopefully we can qualify well. … It was a much better start to the day than the last time I was here.”

In her first full season in her transition from IndyCar, the 30-year-old Patrick went five races with a best finish of 12th before earning her first top-10 (eighth) of the season at Texas.

It was the fourth top-10 of her career. She had run 25 Nationwide races for JR Motorsports the previous two seasons.

Patrick is 11th in the Nationwide standings and said a key to her improvement is crew chief Tony Eury Jr.’s ability to translate her information from a past race into the setup for practice the next time at the track.

“The car felt really comfortable from the get-go,” Patrick said. “So that was a good thing. Part of it is just Tony and I learning each other and him learning what kind of characteristics I like in the car and what’s important.

“We came with a variation of what we ended up with last year when we ran here. That’s a big head start.”