Katherine Legge

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Katherine Legge
Champ Car World Series Record
Nationality	British
Car #	20
Current team	PKV Racing
Race starts	14
Series Championships	0
Wins	0
Podium finishes	0
Pole positions	0
First Champ Car race	2006 Grand Prix of Long Beach
First win	—
edit

Katherine Legge (pronounced 'leg' (IPA pronunciation: [lɛg])) (born 12 July 1980 in Guildford, Surrey, UK) is a British auto racing driver, currently racing in the Champ Car World Series.

In 2005, Legge competed in the Toyota Atlantic Championship. She won the series opener at Long Beach in her first career Toyota Atlantic start. In doing so, she became the first woman to win a major open-wheel race in North America. Legge went on to win her second and third races of the season at Edmonton and San Jose. She finished the season 3rd in the championship with three wins and five podiums. She also received the Toyota Atlantic BBS Rising Star 2005 Award.

Prior to joining the Toyota Atlantic series, she raced in several developmental open-wheel series in Britain, including Formula 3, Formula Renault and Formula Ford. In 2000 she was the first woman to achieve a pole in a Zetec race. In 2001 she beat Kimi Räikkönen's lap record and achieved a pole, and she was the first woman to receive the BRDC's "Rising Star" accolade. She received the 2005 RACER Magazine "Most Promising Road Racer of The Year" award, a title that had been awarded every year since 2002 to A.J. Allmendinger. Other drivers that have won the award include Raikkonen, Jenson Button, Cristiano Da Matta, Alex Barron, Giancarlo Fisichella, Greg Moore, and Gil de Ferran.

Legge made history in November 2005 when she became the first woman to test a Formula One car since 2002 (Sarah Fisher) [1] on the second and third days (22 and 23 November) of the Minardi team's final testing session at the Autodromo Vallelunga near Rome. After she crashed after 2 laps on her first run on the track, it was decided to postpone the test until the following day, on which she completed 27 laps with a best lap time of 1 min 21.176 sec. She was also the first woman to test an A1 Grand Prix car, on December 9-11 2005 with A1 Team Great Britain. [2]

In the off-season, Legge tested a Champ Car once for the Rocketsports Racing and twice for PKV Racing. In February 2006, it was announced that she would drive for PKV Racing in the 2006 Champ Car season. In June, she became the first woman to lead a lap in series history. She finished 6th at Milwaukee and 8th at Cleveland. She lies 3rd in the Rookie of the Year honours, and has helped England to 2nd in the Nations Cup.

In 2006 at Road America, just six laps from the finish line, Katherine suffered an extremely violent accident. It turned out that one of the wing plates on the rear wing broke off just before the kink, an infamous right hander that is taken flat at over 160 mph. Unaware of this, Katherine turned in as normal and the rear of the car lost traction, spinning the car around backwards and into the bare concrete barrier, just past the tire wall. The car hit the wall so hard that it vaulted into the air, scraped against the fencing in a blaze of sparks and fire, flipped end-over-end and smashed into the ground. Upon impact with the ground, the chassis split in two just behind the roll bar, sending the engine and transmission hurtling into the fence in a shower of coolant and fuel. As would be expected, almost all the pieces of Katherine's car had disintegrated or crumpled, and the carbon fiber tub was all that was left surrounding Katherine as she rolled a few more times and finally came to a stop upside down. The Champ Car safety crew was on the scene in seconds and ensured Katherine's safety. Shortly after the incident, Steve Johnson, the president of Champ Car, reported that Katherine smiled and gave a thumbs up as she was being unloaded. Only minutes later, even before the maintenance crew was finished repairing the fence, Katherine stepped out of the medical trailer under her own power, waved to the crowd and smiled. Her only injuries were bruises on her legs and knees from hitting the bulkhead and steering column during the impact.

Contents 1 Career results 1.1 Toyota Atlantic 1.2 Champ Car 2 External links

[edit] Career results

[edit] Toyota Atlantic

(key)

Yr	Team	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	Team	Rank	Points
2005	Polestar	LBH 1	MOT 5	POR 1 9	POR 2 3	CLE 1 16	CLE 2 5	TOR 6	EDM 1	SAN 1	DEN 17	ROA 2	MON 4	Polestar	3rd	267

[edit] Champ Car

Yr	Team	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	Team	Rank	Points
2006	PKV	LBH 8	HST 14	MOT 14	MIL 6	POR 13	CLE 8	TOR 14	EDM 13	SAN 12	DEN 9	MON 13	ROA 16	SUR 15	MEX 16	PKV	16th	133

[edit] External links

• Official site
• Katherine Legge performance report from champcarworldseries.com. Retrieved 8 December 2006.
• Katherine Legge career statistics

2006 Champ Car World Series
Newman/Haas	Forsythe	CTE-HVM	Australia	PKV	Rocketsports	RuSPORT	Coyne	Conquest
1 Bourdais 2 Junqueira	3 Tracy 7 Rice	4 Philippe 14 Clarke	5 Power 15 Tagliani	6 Servia 20 Legge	8 Dominguez 18 Pizzonia	9 Wilson 10 Briscoe	11 Heylen 19 Wirth	27 Ranger 34 Zwolsman
Long Beach - Houston - Monterrey - Milwaukee - Portland - Cleveland - Toronto - Edmonton - San Jose - Denver - Montreal - Road America - Surfers Paradise - Mexico City