Katherine Legge made her NASCAR Cup Series debut at Phoenix Raceway back in March, despite her limited experience in the lower NASCAR series, and there were many who believed that she should not have been given approval to run, especially with a backmarker Live Fast Motorsports team that effectively set her up to fail.
Her debut went about as poorly as expected, and she was the cause of multiple caution flag periods. The nature of her struggles with the car were basically scoffed at as simply inexperience in a Next Gen car that NASCAR quite obviously never should have let her drive that quickly to begin with.
Unfortunately for everybody, one of those cautions came when she inadvertently took out Trackhouse Racing's Daniel Suarez, who had been on course for a top five finish.
Whenever Legge is involved in a crash, a contingent of fans generally pile on both her and NASCAR for letting her compete. She now has five DNFs in six races and two other DNQs across the Cup Series, Xfinity Series, and ARCA Menards Series this year, and yes, a number of her DNFs have indeed been of her own doing.
And that's exactly why her return this weekend is about as ill-timed as it gets.
Due to some of the hateful comments she received after taking out Suarez, Suarez reached out to her, condemned the disparaging comments, and publicly noted that NASCAR was more to blame than anybody for practically setting her up for failure with their ridiculous approval process.
But now Legge is set to make her second career Cup Series start in Suarez's home country, as the Cup Series is set for its first ever Mexico race this Sunday afternoon at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez.
Suarez is naturally a local hero, being the only Mexican Cup Series driver, and he is going to have more support this weekend than he has ever had probably throughout his entire NASCAR career thus far.
Legge, on the other hand, probably hopes to fly under the radar as much as possible after what happened in Phoenix. Hopefully for her, a lot of the Mexican fans who turn up this weekend for this long-awaited event aren't full-time NASCAR fans who are still bitter about the Phoenix incident.
While a road course should give her a better opportunity to not be completely off the pace, the fact that she is once again set to drive for Live Fast Motorsports certainly doesn't help matters, and she will surely be under a microscope. Further incidents will surely generate more talk that pretty much everybody would like to avoid.
However, her career-best NASCAR result did come in a road course race at Road America back in 2018, when she placed 14th in the Xfinity Series race for JD Motorsports.
And she does have a respectable racing record outside of NASCAR, so it's not as if she can't drive a race car. The Next Gen car, however, has proven a far different challenge, and until she runs an incident-free race, the frustration toward NASCAR for continuing to allow her to compete will be justified.
Legge's No. 78 Chevrolet is the only non-chartered (open) car on the entry list for this 100-lap Viva Mexico 250 around the 15-turn, 2.429-mile (3.909-kilometer) road course in Mexico City, Mexico.
Amazon Prime Video is set to air the Viva Mexico 250 live from Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez beginning at 3:00 p.m. ET this Sunday, June 15.