What Katherine Legge Exposes About Modern NASCAR

Katherine Legge finished 17th at this year’s Brickyard 400 for her highest career finish yet. She’s got a lot of backlash this year for poor performances and awful errors, however. Such as when she took out Kahne in his Xfinity return because she couldn’t pick a lane, literally. But this isn’t even her first good run of the year.

Finishing 19th at the Chicago Street Course

With both of these tracks having something in common for Legge. What is her experience on both of these tracks or kinds of tracks? She’s attempted the Indy 500 multiple times before, and being a former sports car driver, she has more street course experience than most NASCAR drivers. She’s never raced anywhere like Rockingham or even tried that style of racing. Familiarity is super crucial for all sorts of drivers, with drivers going from elite to falling off in many series due to a change in technical regulations, like Daniel Ricciardo in F1.

Why NASCAR should allow more testing and extend practice with the Next Gen

Legge isn’t the only driver struggling with a lack of familiarity with the new car, and the drivers, many of NASCAR’s younger drivers, plus Legge, have been working with a vehicle NASCAR has described as different from anything that came before. And these were very successful drivers in the lower series, such as Ty Gibbs, Austin Cindric, and Cole Custer.

A lot of it is because of how different the Next Gen is from its late-model-based Xfinity counterpart. But it’d also be way easier for these younger drivers to adapt and figure out the car if they had more to drive and figure out by themselves, not trying to win a race on top of that. It’s also led to controversies, preventing Jennifer Jo Cobb and Mike Wallace from competing at major high-speed tracks like Daytona and Dega.

So why the heck has NASCAR limited testing and practice?!

For practice, part of it is that it’s a holdover from the COVID era. Where practice went from dead to limited due to lockdown restrictions. But even as COVID has been left in the rearview mirror for most, the limited practices have remained, so why? You ask NASCAR to cut costs and to increase parity, both of which are understandable. How it saves money is obvious: less time on track means less tire wear and less wear on equipment. As for more parity, it’s hard to argue with the results.

This season alone has had 12 different winners in 22 races so far, and in 2022, NASCAR tied the record of most different winners in a year with 19 in the debut year of the Next Gen. Even Legge’s 2 top 20s with Live Fast, one of the worst teams in the field, wouldn’t have been possible even 15 years ago.

Final Thoughts

Do we have to sacrifice seat time for drivers like Katherine Legge or Ty Gibbs and have them struggle for the sake of parity and saving money?! Not. I know the simulations, especially the ones the big-budget teams have, are very accurate, and I’m sure they do more help than we know. But clearly, that 99% accuracy is not enough to make up for the 1-to-1 experience you get by driving the car.

So NASCAR should allow for younger drivers like Ty Gibbs or, in someone like Legge’s case, less experienced drivers to take testing programs at a few of the tracks they own to test a next-gen car, like testing models they make themselves, so they can get time to build that experience and close the gap between them and the veterans!