Q&Auto: Female phenom Legge on Danica, Detroit GP, and pickups

Posted by hpayne on March 1, 2014

The #0 DeltaWing Racing Cars DeltaWing DWC13 driven by Andy Meyrick, Katherine Legge, Alexander Rossi and Gabby Chaves races during practice for the Rolex 24 at Daytona International Speedway on Jan. 23, 2014, in Daytona Beach, Fla. (Jerry Markland/Getty Images)

From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140301/AUTO03/303010019#ixzz2ukH0f1LzAsk driving ace Katherine Legge her favorite racing memory and she’ll tell you her first start at the Indy 500 … and her massive crash at Wisconsin’s Road America in 2006. Come again?

“My rear wing came off at and I instantly lost 1,000 pounds of down force on my car. I hit the wall at 180 mph,” she says about an incident immortalized on YouTube. “I still feel lucky to have walked away from that crash.”

Legge is one tough cookie.

A rare lioness among the lions of professional auto racing, the British-born Legge is one of America’s Big 3 female drivers along with NASCAR’s Danica Patrick and IndyCar veteran Simona De Silvestro. “As a woman you develop a very thick skin,” she told a room full of high school students at the girls-only Detroit International Academy this week, part of the Chevrolet Detroit Belle Isle Grand Prix’s promotional tour before the May 30-June 1 race weekend. Unlike many jockeys in the expensive world of motorsport, she rose from modest roots.

Her resume includes top drives in Europe, but America — where she got her first big break in ChampCar in 2006 — is her professional home. This year, the Indianapolis-based racer is behind the wheel of the radically-designed DeltaWing prototype car in the TUDOR United SportsCar Championship (which will be part of the Belle Isle race weekend). She sat down with me to talk about Danica, DeltaWing, and Detroit pickups.

HP: What do you like about the Detroit Grand Prix?

Legge: I like the atmosphere. It’s obviously very special to the fans. It’s definitely one of the bumpiest tracks.

HP: How is the Delta Wing different to drive?

Legge: To look at it’s very unusual, very futuristic, and ground-breaking. But to drive? It drives like any other race car, which is very strange. Before I got in it I called Andy Meyrick, my co-driver, and said: How do I drive this thing? Because you look at it with its little tires and you think, how is it going to turn?

HP: There are so few women drivers. You, Danica Patrick, and DiSimone De Silvestra are the best known female drivers in U.S. racing. Is there a sorority there? Are you in competition with each other?

Legge: No, there’s no competition. We get on fine, but we don’t stick together really because we’re all trying to forge our own careers. Maybe if we were in the same racing circuit we’d hang out more. But we’re not, so we don’t. It’s circumstances. We were in different series. Danica was in IndyCar while I was in ChampCar so it was a rival series. We’ve maybe said hi to each other three times in my life.

HP: When you were in Europe you raced an Audi A4 sedan …

Legge: It’s not really an Audi A4. It’s based on the Audi A4 but (European Touring Series cars are) the most phenomenal type of race car in terms of how much technology and resources go into it. It’s second only to Formula One in terms of how much money they spend. The amount of money is eye-opening how much Audi — and BMW and Mercedes — put into it. It’s the European version of NASCAR.

HP: What do you drive on the street?

Legge: I drive a truuuuck (effecting an American southern drawl). I’m an English redneck. I can get everything in my pickup truck, I just love it. I listen to country music sometimes, I have embraced the American way of living 110 percent.

HP: You came up through English racing, but you got your big break here in the U.S. How is America different as a racing culture?

Legge: It’s very different. When I came over here 10 years ago, European racing just wasn’t as open to having a woman driving as over here. Things have changed now. But I got my opportunity here because of people like Lynn St. James., Janet Guthrie, Sarah Fisher who had opened the door. It’s always been very different. But you think that Formula One races in places like the Far East where women aren’t even allowed to drive, so a lot of their money comes from those places as well, so it’s difficult politically for them even though they now have token female drivers. The world is not as developed as it is in America. You’ve got a lot more female CEOs and business owners, etc. and that doesn’t happen to any extent in some countries.

From The Detroit News: http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20140301/AUTO03/303010019#ixzz2ukGeCoEL

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