Kevin Harvick on Katherine Legge’s NASCAR Cup series debut: ‘She was thrown to the wolves’

Kevin Harvick is pointing his finger at someone for Katherine Legge’s struggles Sunday during her NASCAR Cup Series debut at Phoenix.

But he’s blaming NASCAR officials, not Legge.

The 44-year-old Legge became the first woman driver to compete in the Cup Series since 2018. She struggled, spinning twice and failing to finish the race.

Afterward, Legge told Fox Sports the race was like a “baptism by fire.” But NASCAR on Fox analyst Harvick used another metaphor when he talked about Legge’s debut during his Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour podcast on Tuesday.

“She was really thrown to the wolves in this situation,” Harvick said. “She’s in the worst car and showing up to Phoenix in a Cup car that she’s never driven, not a lot of NASCAR experience. And I know that we want people from different series to be able to come in to the Cup Series, but we’ve got to get back to some accountability of making sure that the people that are driving these Cup cars are properly prepared to go out on the race track and do the things that they need to do.”

NASCAR officials must approve drivers entering the series. While Legge has experience in other top race series, including IndyCar, she’s made only five Xfinity Series starts. Harvick pointed out that another open-wheel star, four-time Indy 500 winner Hélio Castroneves, had problems when he made his NASCAR debut in the Daytona 500 last month.

“These Cup cars are hard to drive,” Harvick said. “You can’t just let everybody drive it. We saw Hélio do this at Daytona, he smashed up into the wall and then floored it like 100 miles an hour then crashed again for no reason, just because they don’t know the car. … You need some kind of stock-car experience to just jump right into a Cup car and be ready for some of the things that happened in the car. And in this case, it took Daniel Suárez out of the race, running sixth.

“You better be damn ready to drive one of these cars when you get behind the wheel. People just showing up in a car that’s not capable of what the front cars are doing … it’s not fair to the competitors to be put into that position. I would tell you that it ruined Daniel Suárez’s day.

One of Legge’s spins collected Suárez. He talked about the incident after the race and echoed Harvick’s thoughts.

“There’s nothing wrong with her,” Suárez said (via Steven Taranto). “What is wrong is NASCAR. They cannot allow somebody with no experience to run in the Cup Series. Plain and simple.

“You go to Las Vegas, to a fast track, it’s freaking dangerous. You cannot do that. And then here, honestly, this is not a so slow pace. Like, I hit her and I was running 100 MPH slowing down already.”