NASCAR's Daytona 500 decision now looks even more foolish

Katherine Legge made her NASCAR Cup Series debut on Sunday afternoon at Phoenix Raceway with Live Fast Motorsports, and being entirely objective, it went like a lot of people predicted it might.

She qualified last on Saturday and make it to the fourth lap of Sunday's Shriners Children's 500 before spinning and bringing out the race's first caution.

Even Fox Sports driver analysts Kevin Harvick and Clint Bowyer gave her a hard time in the broadcast booth after she told the team on the radio the car wasn't handling well, noting that it's "a natural characteristic" of the Next Gen car and that she basically just needs to get used to it.

Later in the race, as Fox was praising her for riding around (we think?), she spun out again, this time collecting Daniel Suarez and ending the Trackhouse Racing driver's race.

While Suarez's fate might already be sealed, in that Trackhouse Racing development driver Connor Zilisch looks poised to move into the No. 99 Chevrolet next year, a top five finish to wrap up a strong day could have gone a long way toward making the rest of the garage take notice.

But no. Instead, he got collected.

I'm not here to bash Legge and say she shouldn't be allowed to compete; that's a subject for another day. She's certainly not the first driver to make a mistake, much less in a race that featured eight other cautions which she had nothing to do with.

But the fact that she was included in Sunday's race and it turned out the way it did makes NASCAR look entirely foolish for a decision they made a few weeks ago for another driver at Daytona International Speedway.

NASCAR's Daytona 500 decision looks completely boneheaded

NASCAR ruled that Mike Wallace, 65, would not be allowed in the MBM Motorsports (Garage 66) entry due to "lack of recent experience" in major motorsports events.

I understand that NASCAR needs to make decisions based on safety, and superspeedways are different than short ovals. But Legge had one career NASCAR national series oval start to her name, and it came in 2018. The odds of her Cup debut not being eventful were extremely slim.

Wallace, meanwhile, is an 11-time Daytona 500 starter who has finished the race as high as fourth place. And while he has no Next Gen car experience, neither does Legge, and with all due respect to Live Fast Motorsports, putting her in a backmarker car at a track as unique as Phoenix for her Cup debut was just asking for disaster.

Sure enough, disaster struck, and it hit particularly hard for an innocent bystander in Suarez.

Plus, NASCAR didn't even explicitly bar Wallace from the Daytona 500 itself; their decision was arguably worse. They barred him from even attempting to make it into the race.

Where was that logic when Derrike Cope, then 62 years old, competed in his first Daytona 500 since 2004 back in 2021? He was in a chartered car, too, meaning he was actually locked in upon confirmation.

They easily could have let Wallace try to make the race, and if he made it in on merit, let him race; if not, then he's out, just like everybody else who came up short. After all, Chandler Smith, whom Garage 66 called upon to replace Wallace, didn't even qualify.

But instead, they took the easy way out and made life hard on a Garage 66 team that already needs to work extra to put their deals together whenever they want to compete.

It's complete foolishness, but it's typical NASCAR, as far as making up the rules as they go and applying different sets of rules to different folks.

Just ask Chase Elliott and Bubba Wallace what right-hooking somebody got them, and then ask Austin Cindric the same question. Then ask literally everybody else in the garage how they feel about NASCAR's flawed logic. And then finally, ask the 13 teams that signed the new charter agreement how they feel about NASCAR's latest monopolistic threat.