Less than a month after preventing Garage 66 from entering veteran Mike Wallace in the season-opening Daytona 500, NASCAR found themselves in hot water when they let Katherine Legge make her debut at Phoenix Raceway, where she subsequently proved all her critics right when she caused two caution flags and wrecked out an innocent bystander in Daniel Suarez.
Why was Wallace not allowed to compete, but Legge, with no experience whatsoever at the Cup level, allowed to make her debut in an oval race?
Legge's awful debut led to a discussion about NASCAR's process for approving part-time drivers to compete in races, and that heated up even more after it later emerged that not even Tommy Joe Martins was approved to compete at the Cup level.
In lower series, Legge has also had a rough time in 2025, posting five DNFs, two DNQs, and a single finish of 32nd place. But in her three most recent Cup Series starts, all in road or street course races, she has stayed out of any sort of significant trouble and finished 32nd, 19th, and 31st.
But now the debate has been reignited, as Legge is set to make another oval start at the four-turn, 2.5-mile (4.023-kilometer) Indianapolis Motor Speedway in next weekend's Brickyard 400, again behind the wheel of the No. 78 Chevrolet for a backmarker team in Live Fast Motorsports.
Is this really the right call from NASCAR?
Legge does have experience at Indy, having made four career Indy 500 starts (2012, 2013, 2023, and 2024). But as Kyle Larson, and probably even drivers who haven't run both cars at the Speedway, Indiana oval, will probably tell you, driving an open-wheel race car and a stock car at the Brickyard are two very different experiences.
Given Legge's oval struggles in the Xfinity Series and the ARCA Menards Series and the fact that she has not made a single Cup Series oval start since that disastrous Phoenix debut, it is sort of baffling that NASCAR is going to let her run the Brickyard 400. It may not be a drafting track, but Indianapolis Motor Speedway is a superspeedway, in every sense of the word.
She had already been slated to run next month's race at Richmond Raceway, and that actually makes sense; Richmond is a 0.75-mile short track. Now, however, that race does not appear to be a part of her plans.
But NASCAR hasn't exactly been known for making smart decisions lately, so if/when more disaster strikes at Indy, they will have given fans the lowest possible hanging fruit of the year when it comes to criticism over how they run the sport.
For Legge's sake, let's hope she can silence the critics once and for all.
The Brickyard 400 is set to be shown live on TNT Sports from the "Racing Capital of the World" beginning at 2:00 p.m. ET on Sunday, July 27.