{"id":102947,"date":"2025-07-29T20:19:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-29T20:19:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/102947\/"},"modified":"2025-07-29T20:19:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-29T20:19:12","slug":"kevin-harvick-reacts-to-katherine-legge-indy-finish-places-blame-on-nascar-teams","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/102947\/","title":{"rendered":"Kevin Harvick reacts to Katherine Legge Indy finish, places blame on NASCAR teams"},"content":{"rendered":"

Katherine Legge<\/strong> has come a long way since her rocky NASCAR<\/a><\/strong> Cup Series debut earlier this year at Phoenix Raceway. Legge made steady progress over her next three starts and in Sunday\u2019s Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, she put together her best performance to date. <\/p>\n

Legge, driving the No. 78 Chevrolet for Live Fast Motorsports, finished 17th at IMS. She became just the 21st driver to compete in both the Indianapolis 500 and the Brickyard 400. Kevin Harvick<\/strong> came away super impressed by Legge\u2019s performance, he said on his \u201cHappy Hour<\/a>\u201d podcast.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe did great. I\u2019ve been super impressed with the progression of her and her performance,\u201d Harvick said. \u201cI think after the way it started, everybody had a lot of questions of is this just a gimmick. But she continues to get better. I think when you see a finish like this on an oval, we\u2019re going in the right direction. Kudos to her and her team for what they did. \u2026 I think the criticism was well deserved and fair. But I also think the kudos are well deserved and fair, too.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was indeed impressive from Legge, who started back in 38th but worked her way to the front in Stage 3 through strategy. At one point, she spent time running inside the top five before making her final pit stop. <\/p>\n

Katherine Legge impressive of late despite inexperience<\/p>\n

Legge now has two finishes inside the top 20 in five Cup starts this season. Keep in mind that when she shows up to the racetrack, it\u2019s her first time inside the Next Gen car on those tracks. Due to NASCAR\u2019s strict testing policy, she is unable to get any practice in ahead of her starts. Harvick blamed the teams for that, calling on NASCAR to loosen up on its testing policy to allow younger and experienced drivers more opportunity to get acclimated. <\/p>\n

\u201cKatherine Legge is a prime example of the flaws in our testing system,\u201d Harvick said. \u201cYou see how hard it is to develop a Cup driver with how difficult the car is to drive. I\u2019d really like for the rookies and the young drivers to get out on the racetrack more. I know that the teams don\u2019t want to test, and they don\u2019t want to do this. The teams don\u2019t want to do anything. They don\u2019t want to do anything to spend money and that\u2019s a fact. The teams are the biggest holdup in the progression of changing things because of the authority they have through the charter agreements. I think NASCAR would change more things if the teams would agree to do that.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut the testing policy is another piece of the puzzle that I wish they would adjust a little bit for the rookies and the younger people to have some more of those test sessions. Even if NASCAR says they\u2019re going to have testing sessions at four tracks for whatever days it is, I think that people like Katherine, Riley Herbst<\/strong>, Jesse Love<\/strong> \u2014 as different as these cars are to drive compared to [others], even if they took it from the more experienced guys and restructured the testing policy so that it was for the younger drivers to get more developed, I think it would be more beneficial for the sport so it doesn\u2019t take three years to get your Cup driver developed. You\u2019re just doing it by racing and some of them lose their job before they even get started.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Katherine Legge has come a long way since her rocky NASCAR Cup Series debut earlier this year at…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":102948,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[1406,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-102947","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nascar","8":"tag-nascar","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114938378052154694","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102947\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/102948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}