Put some respect on Katherine Legge's name

There's no excuse to treat a competent racing driver with so much hate

For some reason, we're almost a week removed from NASCAR's Rockingham weekend, and I still have to say this.

Put some goddamn respect on Katherine Legge's name.

If you have (somehow (blessedly)) missed this latest saga in the world of motorsport, allow me to sum it up: A woman dared to exist, and men are tripping over themselves to discredit her countless accomplishments and send her death threats. In other words: It's a whole lot of bullshit.

If you haven't had the pleasure of meeting Katherine Legge, allow me to introduce you. Hailing from Guildford, Surrey, England, Legge is the fastest woman in Indianapolis 500 history, and the first woman to win a major open-wheel race in North America.

Her roots are in British open-wheel racing, where she was the first woman to achieve a pole position in a Zetec race, beat Kimi Raikkonen's lap record, and earned the British Racing Drivers’ Club “Rising Star” award. In 2004, when her funding ran out, she sat herself down in Cosworth boss Kevin Kalkhoven's office and refused to leave until he finally sat down with her. Impressed by her gumption, he gave her three races in the 2005 Toyota Atlantic Championship series over in America to find her footing. She won the very first race, then two more on her way to finish third in the championship. She got a Formula 1 test at the end of the year and was crowned RACER Magazine's Most Promising Road Racer of the Year.

Since then, her incredibly decorated career has involved stints in Champ Car, IndyCar, DTM, IMSA, Formula E, GT World Challenge, and various NASCAR-sanctioned series. She's run at Pikes Peak, joined the FIA's Women in Motorsport Commission, and became the first woman to be inducted in the Long Beach Motorsports Walk of Fame. She brought her groundbreaking partnership with e.l.f. Cosmetics to the Indianapolis 500, where the brand invested the money to become the title sponsor of the race.

But it's been in those NASCAR-sanctioned series that Legge has faced a frankly disturbing amount of backlash that seems to center entirely on the fact that she's a woman.

This year, Legge has been working hard to find her footing in stock car racing. It's still a fairly new discipline for her, but she's excited to learn — but rather than celebrating a decorated driver entering a new phase of her career, the world's dumbest assholes are branding her a “DEI hire” and telling her to kill herself.

The bullshit started at the ARCA series opener, when Legge was caught up in a wreck that involved several cars, including that of YouTuber Cleetus McFarland — though it was Amber Balcaen who suffered the worst of the backlash. Still, it set the tone for the season: Let's all be dicks to women!

In Phoenix, she made her Cup Series debut and unfortunately spun, collecting sixth-placed Daniel Suarez at the time.

“We made some changes to the car overnight and they were awful,” Legge said.

“I was so loose. I was hanging onto it. We kept making adjustments. We kept making the car way more stable for me. At the end there, I think we were relatively quick, so it wasn’t bad. I wish we hadn’t made the changes. It was a rough start.”

Suarez didn't help by claiming that NASCAR set Legge up for failure (implying, effectively, that Legge was not qualified). Enter a slew of bullshit comments about how she makes Danica Patrick look good, that Mike Wallace deserved his Daytona 500 ride more than Legge deserved her Phoenix race, and that “I guess NASCAR didn't get the DEI memo.”

And now, Rockingham. During the Xfinity event, ownership points prevented her from securing a starting spot on the grid (though had it been based on speed alone, she'd have made it comfortably in the field). Joey Gase Motorsports offered Legge the No. 53 of J. J. Yeley, and she was able to start the race.

Then, William Sawalich rear-ended her into the path of Kasey Kahne during his big NASCAR return, and once again, everybody lost their minds. And this time, Legge and other folks in her circle made a point of sharing some of the hateful, inappropriate and disturbing messages she's been receiving in her DMs.

The fact that Legge had to address this hate on her podcast (Throttle Therapy — go listen to the whole entire thing) is absurd, but she handled it with grace:

Being a woman racing in NASCAR, it comes with an incredible sense of pride. It comes with a level of scrutiny and harassment. The hate mail, the death threats and the inappropriate sexual comments that I have received on just disturbing. They're unacceptable.

Let me be very clear: I’m here to race and I’m here to compete, and I won’t tolerate any of these threats to my safety or to my dignity, whether that’s on track or off of it.

I have earned my seat on that race track. I’ve worked just as hard as any of the other drivers out there, and I’ve been racing professionally for the last 20 years. I’m 100 percent sure that the ... the teams that employed me — without me bringing any sponsorship money for the majority of those 20 years — did not do so as a DEI hire, or a gimmick, or anything else. It’s because I can drive a race car.

Luckily, I have been in tougher battles than you guys in the comment sections.

Damn right.

Legge made a point of noting that she's not shunning “constructive criticism” from passionate fans; she's exclusively referring to the people who felt compelled to threaten her body, safety, integrity, and life.

Katherine Legge is not a DEI hire. Katherine Legge is an experienced racer with international credentials who has more than earned a shot at competing in a NASCAR-sanctioned series.

It is entirely possible to think that maybe she should have made her Cup debut on a different race course, or that additional track time would have helped her. It's entirely possible to say that she has not mastered the art of stock car racing.

But so what? So fucking what? Since when does “not being perfect” disqualify you from having a chance at improving? Since when is the expectation that in your first races, you dominate from pole position and win everything in a car that is far from the best on the track?

Because I sure as hell know I can look at every NASCAR field on a given weekend and point out a few folks whose credentials we should call into question long before you should even consider thinking about Katherine Legge. (Like, did any of you even watch the Xfinity race at Martinsville? Because I sure did, and it looks like these guys are fully capable of racing like the Dumbest Humans Alive all on their own.)

I'm sick of it. I'm sick of men being so offended by the mere presence of women in their lives that they have to bend over backwards to invent justifications for why those women don't deserve to be there. I'm sick of men acting like they're perfect and untouchable and also deserving of accolades. I'm sick of men projecting their insecurities on women. Sick of it.

So get over yourselves and put some goddamn respect on Katherine Legge's name.