Legge becomes 9th woman to earn Indy 500 spot
Katherine Legge became the ninth woman to earn a starting spot in the Indianapolis 500 as qualifying ended Sunday at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
A week ago, her chances seemed remote.
Legge's IndyCar team, owned by Roger Penske's youngest son, Jay, was locked in a contract dispute with Lotus. Both sides said the other owed them money, and Penske filed a $4.6 million lawsuit in Los Angeles.
How all that got resolved is for the lawyers to know, but Penske was given just enough time to negotiate a new engine lease with Chevrolet for cars piloted by Legge and Sebastien Bourdais.
Bourdais, the four-time Champ Car champion (2004-07) and Legge took the machines and ran. A couple of things slowed them on pole day, but they earned spots in the 33-car field Sunday with respectable runs.
Bourdais was the day's fastest qualifier at 223.760 mph. He will start 25th next weekend. Legge was sixth among Sunday's nine qualifiers and will start 30th.
"We haven't had any testing time, but we're here," Legge said. "We've made the best of it. We're all smiling right now. You can only think about forward not what-ifs."
Bourdais wanted more from his run.
"If I had not turned that 223.9 (Saturday) morning I would have been fine not making the show yesterday," he said. "But that big slowdown right when you needed to be fast was really a big bummer.
"When I woke up this morning I was still disappointed. To be honest, I didn't know quite what to do. We have really limited amount of time and laps and everything to get it solid."
Also qualifying Sunday was A.J. Foyt Racing drivers Wade Cunningham, a rookie, and Mike Conway, Oriol Servia, Ed Carpenter, rookie Bryan Clauson, Simona De Silvestro and rookie Jean Alesi.
Alesi joined Rubens Barrichello as former Formula One drivers in this field. But he's in one of the Lotus-powered cars that was significantly behind the 17 Chevrolets and the 14 Hondas. De Silvestro drives the other. Her four-lap average was 214.393 mph; Alesi's was 210.094 mph.
No other teams rolled out cars to bump them from the field, making this one of the quietest bump days in 500 history.
The only accident of the day came when Charlie Kimball, who earned the 14th starting spot with Ganassi Racing, crashed in Turn 1 during afternoon practice.
Carpenter, Clauson and Servia came back from Saturday crashes to earn spots in the field.
Legge said there's a mental hurdle that has to be cleared at Indy.
"At the end of the day it's a race track. I drive around it in a race car," she said. "We're all professionals and yes there's lots of things to get figured out, but it's a very special place, more because it's mental more than anything else. Because of all the ceremony and the tradition and everything else that surrounds it, it really gets inside your head.
"In qualifying, all I had to basically do was go out, put my foot to the floor and drive around for four laps. It (was) like that. But you still get nervous. It's the Indy 500 for goodness sake. I watched Michael Andretti, Nigel Mansell and those guys when I was a kid, and I wanted to do that. I'm getting the opportunity to."
