INDIANAPOLIS — NASCAR is back at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway for Brickyard Weekend, with the NASCAR Cup Series and Xfinity Series racing on back-to-back days.
Katherine Legge is pulling double duty. She'll be competing in the NASCAR Cup Series and Xfinity Series races, but it's not her first time at the famed Brickyard.
“I’m hoping that it feels natural to be back in Indy. I’ve raced the 500 there, so I’ve raced IndyCar and I’ve never raced stock cars there — so it will be new to me,” she said.
Legge has competed in 10 stock car races so far this year. She earned a top-20 finish in the Cup Series on the streets of Chicago.
“It’s been my rookie season in a lot of ways, in both Xfinity and Cup, and I’ve learned a ton, and I feel like we’ve shown some promise,” Legge said. “It’s been tough at times. I’ve been taken out a whole lot too. It’s just the way the cookie crumbles. I think that it’s turned a corner and we’re on the right track, no pun intended.”
Legge continues to be a trailblazer for women in motor sports. In March, she became the first woman since Danica Patrick to start a Cup Series race. In 2024 at the Indy 500, she debuted a pink race car sponsored by e.l.f. Cosmetics.
“They said we’re going to do a pink car and I said, 'No, that’s so cliché, like it’s going to be the girl in the pink car,' but it was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Legge said. “Everybody here got behind the pink car, and I had little girls in little pink jerseys, and everybody felt like they were part of something, as I did.”
As she continues to make history, Legge is also finding renewed purpose in her NASCAR journey.
“I love the newfound motivation I have for NASCAR racing,” she said. “It’s not like sports car racing that I’ve done for a decade or more, that I could do it with my eyes closed in a way. This is new and exciting and challenging and [the] most competitive championship in North America, so I feel very blessed to be around doing it.”
