On Sunday, May 28, Briton Katherine Legge will rejoin the USA’s top level single-seater championship when she tackles the Indy 500 for the third time. The 42-year-old will join the Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing for an experience that she says she is going to relish.
It will be an interesting adventure for the woman who is now more used to racing in GT cars in the IMSA series in the USA in a Gradient Racing Acura NSX. Legge’s CV is impossible to ignore, and it includes some of the highest profile racing championships on the globe. After cutting her teeth on junior single-seater racing in the UK, success in the 2005 Toyota Atlantic category in 2005 propelled her into the limelight. She has since gone on to tackle Champ Cars, IndyCar, Formula E, the DTM and prototypes. There are a lot of boxes ticked on her career journey that would be the envy of many other of her rivals as she was coming up through the ranks.
Legge took time out of her busy schedule to tackle the Motorsport News readers’ questions, as we are grateful.
Question: I think Katherine is originally from Haslemere (where we live) so I am interested to know what made you want to be a race car driver?
Hannah Gleave (aged nine)
Via email
Katherine Legge: “Hannah is right, I am from Haslemere and my parents are still there. I was born in Guildford. I went to Godalming College. I know that area very well and I love Guildford, it is home!
“I got interested in racing because we went on a family holiday to Spain when I was young and my dad and my uncle had a go on the go karts there. They loved it, and there was an advert in the local paper, the Haslemere Herald, when we got home for the Blackbushe go kart facility over near Camberley, which isn’t too far away. So it was dad who was the one who wanted to go and we went and had a look.
“He got his kart first and I nagged him enough that he got me one. Then he stopped racing and just focused on what I was doing. I was already addicted to it. I suppose I was a bit of a tomboy and I just loved the adrenaline and the speed.
“Then we started following Formula 1 and at the same time, I was off karting everywhere, and it quickly became my passion and my obsession, so I followed my dreams as best I could…”
MN: So who was quicker in a kart then: you or your dad?
“Me, definitely. But I weighed nothing compared to him when we were karting, so
