After five years, Katherine Legge will return to the NASCAR Xfinity Series as she joins SS-Green Light Racing for a four-race schedule starting Saturday at Road America. Additional races are planned at Indianapolis Motor Speedway on 12 August, Watkins Glen International on 19 August, and the Charlotte Motor Speedway Roval on 7 October.
Legge ran four Xfinity races in 2018 as a road course ringer for JD Motorsports, though she also did an oval start at Richmond, with a best run of fourteenth at Road America.
Since then, Legge has focused primarily on sports car racing, finishing second in the 2018 IMSA GTD championship by just four points. She and the Gradient Racing team currently sixth in the 2023 standings, barely missing the podium in the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona where she had stood second to kick off her 2018 campaign. Legge also raced for the all-female Iron Lynx in the 2021 FIA World Endurance Championship.
In May, she returned to the NTT IndyCar Series for the first time in a decade as she entered the Indianapolis 500 for Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing. However, the month was plagued by misfortune as she outqualified her team-mates before being involved in a massive practice crash that resulted in Stefan Wilson fracturing a vertebrae and sitting out the race. Her 500 ended after spinning as she came to pit road and brushing the wall.
“The Indy 500 made me realise that life and racing careers are too short not to go for it,” Legge said. “My interest and passion are to continue to break new ground in motorsports. I’ve been proactive over the last year in thinking about what I want to do in my career and how I can accomplish those things.”
SSGLR’s #07 is thirty-eighth in owner points with Blaine Perkins starting the year in the car before being replaced by a carousel that has included Dawson Cram, Carson Hocevar, Mason Maggio, Stefan Parsons, Spencer Pumpelly, David Starr, and Daniel Suárez. The car has struggled throughout the year, failing to qualify twice and holding a best finish of just twenty-second twice. Hocevar retired from the first road course race at COTA as did Parsons at the next in Portland. Suárez and Pumpelly respectively fnished twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth at Sonoma and Chicago.
