NASCAR legend SLAMS decision to let Katherine Legge race in Cup Series

One of the most successful NASCAR Cup Series drivers in history has hit out at a decision made by the organization this week.

British driver Katherine Legge made her Cup Series debut at Phoenix on Sunday, despite a self-confessed lack of Next-Gen car experience.

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Legge, an experienced open-wheel and sportscar driver with a number of IncyCar races under her belt, had only raced once in the Xfinity Series since 2018 and admitted before the Phoenix race that she's been given barely two weeks notice that she'd be stepping into the car in Arizona.

The 44-year-old spun in the first few laps of the race, bringing out a caution but not hitting any other drivers as she was running at the back of the field. However, some 200 laps later, she spun again when trying to avoid a car lapping her and ended up collecting the then-top 10 running Daniel Suarez.

Suarez was knocked out of the race thanks to the collision, although he didn't criticize Legge for the wreck after the race, saying there was 'nothing wrong' with the driver – but hitting out at NASCAR for allowing a driver with such little stock car experience to mix it with Cup Series drivers on a high-speed oval.

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Should Katherine Legge have driven in NASCAR?

NASCAR great Kevin Harvick expressed similar sentiments on his Happy Hour podcast on Tuesday, saying: “She was really thrown to the wolves in this situation. She’s in the worst car and showing up to Phoenix in a Cup car that she’s never driven, not a lot of NASCAR experience.

"I know that we want people from different series to be able to come in to the Cup Series, but we’ve got to get back to some accountability of making sure that the people that are driving these Cup cars are properly prepared to go out on the race track and do the things that they need to do.”

Harvick compared Legge's debut to IndyCar legend Helio Castroneves' debut at the Daytona 500 last month, saying: “These Cup cars are hard to drive. You can’t just let everybody drive it. We saw Helio do this at Daytona, he smashed up into the wall and then floored it like 100 miles an hour then crashed again for no reason, just because they don’t know the car.

"You need some kind of stock-car experience to just jump right into a Cup car and be ready for some of the things that happened in the car. And in this case, it took Daniel Suarez out of the race, running sixth.

“You better be damn ready to drive one of these cars when you get behind the wheel. People just showing up in a car that’s not capable of what the front cars are doing...it’s not fair to the competitors to be put into that position. I would tell you that it ruined Daniel Suárez’s day."

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