Auto racing: Katherine Legge will be Coyne Racing’s lone competitor in this year’s Indianapolis 500

SPEEDWAY, Ind. – Dale Coyne, celebrating his 40th anniversary in the open-wheel racing business this year, usually has two cars, sometimes three, in the Indianapolis 500.

Not this year. The circumstances of finances and driver error are limiting him to one shot for his Plainfield-based racing team to win the biggest show in motorsports on Sunday.

Katherine Legge is that driver. When agreeing to drive for Dale Coyne in the Indianapolis 500 this spring, she knew the parameters of the assignment.

She knew that the ride was contingent on her finding sponsorship. She brought in e.l.f. Cosmetics to sponsor the car. It’s the pink one in the last row of the 33-car field.

She knew that the budget wouldn’t be near what the big teams up front – Penske, Ganassi, Andretti, McLaren – bring to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

She knew the chance of winning would be small. Legge starts on the inside of the 11th row, which means pole-sitter Scott McLaughlin will have a thousand-foot head start whenever the green flag for the 108th 500-Mile Race wave. It was originally scheduled for 11:45 a.m. CST Sunday, but had been delayed, for the time being to a later start Sunday with the possibility of being postponed until Monday.

She’s more than all right with all that. She’s been down this 800-left-turn road before.

“Dale actually give me one of my first opportunities back in Champ Car back in the day,” said Legge, who ran 14 races for Coyne in 2007, with a sixth-place finish her best showing. “We have a really good relationship. He’s trying really hard. He’s ebbed and flowed throughout the years in terms of competitiveness depending on how much budget he has to work with.”

The budget has always been the rub for Coyne, whose team has been in open-wheel racing since 1984 and has six victories as a team in 836 starts. There have been times when he’s had two fully-sponsored cars and sometimes a third for the 500; others when he’s had to run a rent-a-car operation. This year is a rent-a-car year. Legge and her sponsor brought the money for Indianapolis, as did 19-year-old rookie Nolan Siegel, who was the only driver bumped from qualifying last Sunday.

That leaves Coyne with one car in the field and two to repair. Siegel, while highly touted, crashed twice in three days in different chariots. Legge, in contrast, managed to nick the wall out of Turn 4 on one of her qualifying attempts and keep going.

“At the end of the day, I’m just a race car driver trying to do the very best job that I can do,” Legge said. “I do pinch myself at how lucky I am, because I got to live my dream. I’ve worked very hard to live my dream. I’ve been in racing for, like, 20 years now, which is an achievement in itself, I think.”

Part of several sports car victories, she’s yet to win in IndyCar. That goal is likely to remain unachieved on Sunday. Back-of-the-field starters for the small teams just don’t win the 500.

“When you just do Indy, you’re not in the car week in, week out, it’s tough to be able to say exactly what the car needs,” Legge said. “I can say what the car is doing, but I need so many things from it, it’s tough to exactly pinpoint where that’s coming from. I think we have a direction.

“Right now we didn’t have any speed on Monday (practice). We found a little bit of balance, but we lost a whole bunch of speed. I didn’t have anything to fight with. I couldn’t suck up on any cars. In fact, even when I was in the slipstream, I was getting dropped when I was flat.”

Being back with Coyne is a throwback for her.

“Dale is just like a stalwart of IndyCar racing, right?” Legge said. “He’s well-respected, super passionate about it. You don’t find that very often. These teams kind of come in and go out, but there’s a handful that have been around forever, and Dale is one of them.

“Back in the Justin Wilson days, they did a really, really good job with very little,” Legge said. “They were fighting against the big teams with less than half the budget. Can’t fault him in any way, shape or form. The guys have so much heart. They’re such a great team. It’s almost like – what’s that? David and Goliath.

“It’s like you’re the underdog, basically. They’ve got so many fans, and they’ve got so much love that it feels very supportive. It’s a very close-knit environment and you don’t get that every time, so it’s really cool to be part of.”