Katherine Legge admits adapting to NASCAR has been a challenge, but the Great Britain native is getting the hang of driving a stock car after her long history driving sports cars like in IMSA.
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At 45 years old, Legge is one of the oldest drivers in the Cup Series this season and an unofficial rookie as well. She’s made six starts in the first 24 races and has had her struggles. Her best finishes have been 17th in the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis and 19th in the Chicago Street Race. As for her four other appearances, she has not finished higher than 30th.
If you think that’s bad, Legge has struggled even more in the Xfinity Series, which is supposed to help prepare a driver for eventually competing in the top tier. She’s made 11 career starts and has failed to finish seven of those times, including failing to finish five of her six Xfinity races this season (four times were due to crashes).
To her credit, however, in Legge’s six starts in the Cup Series this year for Live Fast Motorsports, she’s only failed to finish just once. “There’s been so many challenges,” Legge said on this week’s edition of the Stacking Pennies podcast with Corey LaJoie.
“First of all, the car is very different to everything I’ve driven before. Everything I’ve driven before has a lot of downforce and just is different. This moves around a lot. Very heavy weight transfer. You don’t set the car up in a similar way. So, a lot of the stuff that I’ve learned in sports cars or any car doesn’t translate. It’s almost like a different sport.
“So there’s the actual driving aspect of it, but then there’s all the auxiliary stuff like even when you go to a track, I’ve never been to most of these tracks, like where is credentials, where do you drive out to pit lane? The choose, the first time I had to do the choose, I was like, ‘What now? What are we talking about here?’ And so it’s just a lot of new stuff.”
Legge’s mind cannot wander in a NASCAR race
The biggest difference and the hardest thing Legge has had to learn and adapt to is, how in NASCAR, your mind has to be racing at two or three times the speed you’re going in your race car. In other words, you have to constantly be thinking, anticipating, questioning and still find a way to make forward progress around other cars.
“The most challenging thing I guess that covers all of it across the board is having to consciously think live time about everything,” Legge said. “You get to the point where you’ve been doing it for so long, I was in sports cars. I could go to an IMSA race and I didn’t use my brain that much, right? I just turned up.
“I knew what to do in pit stops. I knew what the car needed. I knew what to tell my teammates. I knew when I looked at the data, I could brake a little bit later in Turn 4. (It was) easy. Do that the next time out. There wasn’t a lot of conscious thinking going on. My subconscious was just doing it all for me.
“(Driving a sports car is) smoother and it’s better because your subconscious mind can work so much more efficiently than your conscious mind can. Your conscious mind is like a step behind in my opinion. So, I’m trying to make it like program it so that it’s more and more subconscious and more comfortable.
“Like when I get in the car and I relax, I’m like, “Okay, I know what I’m doing now. I know how to do a start. I know how to look at the lights on the dash for pit lane. I know when to pull into pit lane. I know what the stage is. I know that we’re going to be doing a pit stop in the middle of the last stage.”
