January 21, 2025 • 21 mins
Katherine shares what she learned from her first time racing on dirt and her first time racing a midget car at the Chili Bowl. We hear her initial thoughts and anticipation following her first test run, and then her review of how the race went after the fact – including her car flipping.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Throttle Therapy with Catherine leg is an iHeart women's sports
production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You
can find us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts. Hey you guys, and welcome
(00:23):
to this week's episode of Throttle Therapy with Me Catherine Legg.
And this week's episode is special. I say that every week,
but this week, this week's episode is special because I
ran I introduced throstle therapy to the world by running
it on the side of a midget car. And I
did that at the Chili Bowl. And the Chili Bowl
(00:45):
is the super Bowl of midget racing. It's the super
Bowl of dirt track racing. It's the one event that
everybody wants to go to and win this Golden Driller.
It's based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it's basically who is
who of sprint car racing goes there and there are
some phenomenal drivers. There are over four hundred cars, which
(01:07):
is just bonkers for me to get my head around.
And they cycle through all these heat nights from the
Monday to the Friday, and then everybody goes into the
main races on Saturday, you get so little practice and
so experience counts for a lot. But it's basically in
this big expo center, they truck in all this dirt
and make this quarter mile over out of the dirt
(01:29):
that they wet down, and you drive around it as
fast as you can, and your heat race is making
up as many spots as you can because you get
points based on places, not where you finish, and then
you transfer into C Main, B Main, A Main, and
then you transfer onto the Saturday. So realistically, with that
many cars, you could be in like the S Main
(01:50):
on the Saturday, or you could be in the B Main,
or you know, like there are so many cars and
so many races. So we are going to split this
episode into two parts. First part up until I run
the midget and you hear about that experience, and the
second part will be my race day. So I know
(02:13):
we've already spoken a lot about the Chili Bowl, and
I've introduced you to Brett, the team owner, but now
I'm going to explain to you my thoughts and feelings
after first running the car. So my foray into the
world of midget racing on dirt has begun. I have
(02:34):
now completed my first ever lapse on dirt, my first
ever lapse in a midget car, and I'm very fortunate
to be with one of the best teams, Abacus Racing,
and I have two very good teammates, obviously, one of
which is Santino Frucci I race Cindycar with, and the
other is a young lady called Kaylie Bryson, and she's
well regarded as one of the best midget races in
North America. And so I have this great team of
(02:58):
people around me. I've done my stuf, I've watched video,
I've looked at how to steer the car with the
steering wheel versus steer the car with the gas pedal,
and so midget racing is completely different to anything I've
ever driven before in the terms of the way the
car is the fact that it has absolutely no downforce.
(03:19):
How you sit in the car, the wheel is enormous
and very horizontal, so it feels a little bit like
driving a truck. Your legs go down into the footwell again,
a bit like driving a truck where the brake pedal's
on somewhat of a slider and it pushes down into
the floor, as does the throttle pedal a little bit.
It rotates a little bit round more than the brake pedal.
(03:42):
But it's a very different driving position to be on
top of the car controlling it. And it wants to
be sideways, wants to be sideways always. You've got really
soft tire pressures, You've got a lot of stagger in
the car, so the car wants to be sideways. The
car is asked when you're not totally sideways, but you're
(04:03):
not totally straight either. So I've been watching a lot
of video. I've been watching a lot in the arena
and trying to learn the dance that you have to
do between the steering and the gas. And it seems
to me that when you watch people like Kyle Larson,
who is a masterclass at driving anything, let's be honest,
(04:26):
but especially driving these cars, and you see the little
amount of steering input that he does, and he's all
controlling it with the throttle. And this is completely alien
to me because I've spent thirty years trying not to
go sideways, and now to train my brain to be
comfortable going sideways is a whole other, whole other learning process.
(04:48):
I came into this test very tired because all of
the flights were messed up so we didn't get in
until three thirty in the morning, and then trying to
focus on how to learn a whole a different concept
of racing. And it's a little overwhelming because you don't
want to embarrass yourself, like the whole schedule of being
(05:09):
pushed around and going down the ramp and putting it
in gear and like putting the fuel pressure on before
you switch on and knowing when that is up to
speed and pressure enough to start the car, and then
circulating and like how it all works. It's just you
have to be very focused. And I had so few
(05:31):
laps on my first day of doing it. So you
go out and you do like a three or four
lap run and they check a flag you and then
you wait the remainder of the day and you go
out and you do another three lap run. So you
do a ten second lap at the Chili Bowl. It's
really short. You do two runs, and at the end
of it, you have like less than two minutes of
experience in a midgicica. And these guys are racing sixty
(05:52):
times a year and they're really good, and I have
so much respect for some of them. I mean, they
could literally drive anything. They could shopping trolleys if they
wanted to. And so I'm trying to just go out
there and get fast enough that I don't embarrass myself
so I can go into my heat races and know
that I can learn in those two and work my
(06:13):
way up and hopefully do somewhat decently. Like I'm under
no illusion that I'm going to be in the amine
and be super competitive and have any chance that will win,
although I will say I think my car is capable
of winning. At the moment, I am definitely not. But
I am learning and I'm treating it with the respect
that I think it deserves, and I'm getting to meet
some really cool people, and it's another experience that I
(06:35):
think will make me grow as a driver. And I
think the more things that I can challenge myself with
and the more comfortable I get being uncomfortable, the better
I will be. And so while this is an unnatural
feeling to me right now, by the end of the
chili bowl, I think I will feel like I have
learned and achieved something and I will have gotten exponentially better.
(06:59):
And so I'm very much looking to the point in
time where I feel more comfortable looking through the side
window of the car than I do the front. We're
just going to take a quick break and when we
come back you can hear all about my race day escapades.
(07:27):
So much to tell you guys about the Chili Bowl.
It was and entirely your experience in me one not
without its highs and lows. I have to say it
was an interesting week. I learned a ton. I still
have so much to learn in that kind of car,
(07:49):
and also on Derek. It was overwhelming in a lot
of ways, but it was also a lot of fun
and a big challenge and one that ended in a
little bit of a bad way for me. A little bit,
I mean a lot of a bad way, but still positive,
still looking forward to doing it again one day. So
my week started off where we went to the Arena
(08:12):
and it's an inside Expo center in Tulsa, and it
is the biggest midget race of the year. It is
this flagship star event and they ship this dirt into
this Expo center and we are there for a whole week.
Me and three hundred and eighty something others, most of
(08:35):
them race like sixty times a year and they're really
used to racing on dirt, so little me turning up
thinking I can do this, it was a little bit naive.
I think it was a baptism of fire. And I
turn up on this Sunday, which is when you get
to do your hot lapse, which is effectively what they
call practice, and you get to do two lots of
hot laps, and you get to do two lots of
(08:55):
like four laps, so you're in the car for about
ninety seconds, but you learn what it's all about, how
to be push started, when to run around, when to go,
how everything works. And I was like a deer in
the headlights for that. So the team took me off
site on Wednesday to an outdoor dirt track called Port
(09:21):
City I think it was called, and it was very
similar to the Chili Bowl setup, and we did a
hundred laps and I felt super comfortable and I loved
the team so much. They were great, and I just
I got to know the car and I had so
much fun. But we were there pretty much by ourselves,
so I was running around able to drive this car
(09:42):
totally sideways, bearing in mind I've spent twenty plus years
trying to not go sideways. The biggest mind mess up
that I found was to go faster and to have
more grip, you need to go in harder, which means
(10:03):
you need to go in on the gas pedal because
the more sideways you are, the more side bite in
the tire you have because we run the pressure so
low and these things are really soft, and so in
order to get the car to feel good, you have
to drive it into the corner harder, and so traditionally,
you know, we break all lyft and then we set
the car up, we set the weight in the car,
and then we accelerate through. It's a totally different way
(10:27):
of driving, completely different, but a lot of fun, a
lot of sideways. Not going to be scared of going
sideways anytime soon, but I probably will not be accelerating
through it in either a stock car or an IndyCar,
and so anyway, super comfortable by myself. Then we go
back to the arena for Thursday night, which is my
qualifying night, and in the first heat, which you get
(10:52):
judged on how many people you overtake, so you get
points based on how many people you overtake. You also
get finishing points, but it's mostly passing points. And so
I started off third on the inside and I got
boxed and went back to p last literally midway through
turn one. So at this point I'm like, great, my
week's over. This sucks. I don't know what I could
(11:15):
have done differently. There was nowhere for me to go.
There was a car in front of me, so I'm
like second to last behind the car that boxed me,
and I drive around. It passed one car and I
finished there and I'm thinking this is not going according
to plan. I did not want to make a fall
out of myself or embarrass myself. Although a lot of
people came and said, you know, kudos for attempting it,
so I appreciated that there was a little bit of
(11:36):
respect for actually doing it. I think a lot of
people were trying to see whether I failed or not,
and I don't know whether you would call it a
success or a failure. I mean, I didn't didn't really
put a foot wrong, So in a way, I'm proud
of what I did. So that put me in a
very lowly main final for the Thursday night, and I
(11:59):
did really well. At the beginning of Thursday night, I
was overtaking cars, I was aggressive, we were racy. The
car was really good. The team, as I've said before,
were awesome. The car was amazing, Like I was just
able to have gripe and pass people. Then the yellow
came out and I don't know that I'm happier admitting
this publicly, but I got in my own head and
(12:21):
I started overthinking things, and the more I overthought things,
the worse it got for me. And I got passed
by a couple of cars, so we ended up finishing
fifth instead of third. But overall was a success. So
we roll into Saturday, have Friday off. I feel like
I'm getting sick on Friday. They call it the chili
(12:42):
bowl flu. I woke up on Saturday and I was
absolutely fine, but it was like, I guess, in your head,
like your sinuses get a little bit messed up. So
I was worried that I was getting sick. But nope,
I'm all good. Roll into Saturday and I'm there early
Saturday morning because like I'm eager to go, it's go time.
I am determined to make my way through as many
(13:03):
of these heat races as possible. Obviously, I didn't qualify
very well from my night of racing, so I'm like
third or fourth race. I'm thinking, Okay, I can get
through at least two or three of these. This is
gonna be awso'm going to make my way to the front.
Unfortunately it was not to be, so I was feeling
pretty racy. I went to the outside to overtake a
(13:24):
couple of cars at the start, and that gap just
got taken away from me by the car in front
bearing in mind lesson learn on my part, because you
don't have mirrors, you don't have spotters, so you don't
know where the other cars are. And in a way,
he was totally within his rights to take whichever line
he wanted. I just wasn't expecting it because everybody went
to the inside. So I ended up climbing his rear
(13:47):
wheel with my front left tire his right rear and
flipping into the fence and then pretty high in the air,
and I think I rolled it about three or four times,
came down on its roof. I have to say I
saw Santino, my teammate, roll it twice the night before
and get out like it was nothing. And then I
see literally every other heat rate somebody's rolling it and
(14:10):
getting out like it was nothing. So I thought ah,
these cars are designed to do that. It's fine. It's
not fine. It hurts. So I got out and I
have got bruce knees and bang my head pretty good.
But I am actually fine. It was just knock the
wind out of me. When you flip a chili ball cart,
(14:32):
it looks totally like a monster truck flip. They are
designed for it. They have the roll cages in them,
and it looks like no big deal, like when you're
watching it now. I have flipped a car before. It's
a lot more of a bigger deal when you're going
at faster speeds and when the cars are not designed
(14:53):
for it. Now, luckily, we are living in twenty twenty
five and the safety of all these vehicles is amazing. Honestly,
be a chili bowl car, an IndyCar, a sports car,
stock car, whatever it is, they're designed to withstand crazy crashes,
(15:14):
and I've been very lucky. I actually, if you type
Catherine Leg into Google, you will see the biggest crash
you've ever seen before. In two thousand and six, I
climbed the fence in an IndyCar at one hundred and
eighty miles an hour and that was epics. So I
feel I feel like I've got nine lives, and I
feel like I've used at least four or five of them,
(15:38):
and I don't enjoy it in any way, shape or form.
It's funny because Tom, a gentleman that I coach in
a Porsche, he says that he enjoys crashing and it's
like an adrenaline rush for him. I'm like, are you crazy.
I literally get out of the car and I want
to cry, but there's no crying and racing, so there's
(15:58):
no way I would actually cry race track. I've trained
myself over the years not to but the emotion and
the outlet that you feel is just it's a big deal.
It's awful. So don't want to do that again. But
I again walked away from it, and so I think
it's just testament to the strength of the cars. But
(16:20):
it's never pleasant. In my experience, it hasn't put me off.
I still I'm just I'm kind of gutted, honestly, because
I really wanted to prove my metal and make my
way through a few of those heats, like like Santino did,
and prove that I do have a modicum of natural
talent that I can go and jump in anything and
(16:41):
do something like that. But obviously I didn't get to
prove that, so I feel like there's some unfinished business there.
So sitting here now, if I was Catherine from the past,
(17:05):
if I was one week ago Catherine, I would probably
be able to avoid the inevitable demise of my midget
my midget race, because I think in hindsight, and hindsight's
always twenty twenty, and it's always easier to look back
and say, well, you didn't learn enough, or you didn't
do this. I think it's a lesson for moving forward.
(17:29):
I sat there at the Chili Bowl and I watched
hours of racing, trying to learn from everybody else, and
I saw hundreds, not just tens, but hundreds of flips,
and they're very much all where you either climbed the
wall or climbed another car. And if I had put
(17:50):
two and two together and made four and actually thought
about it, then I would have realized that going to
the outside was the most dangerous place to put yourself,
especially at the start, and it would be really easy
to climb somebody else's wheel if they balked at any
point in time. So I think if I had actually
had that thought on that process, and maybe maybe I
(18:12):
need to ask myself more questions going into these new things.
I mean, I asked a ton of questions of other people,
and I knew that it's easy to climb the wheel,
but it wasn't one of those things that I focused on.
So I think, again, hindsight's always twenty twenty. I would
probably have avoided that. I think the preparation for everything else,
you just go at your own pace. So I don't
(18:33):
think I would have changed that. I pushed it as
hard as I could, and I think just driving I
was fine, But the racing is a whole new ballgame.
It is a ball ring out there, and so I
think I would have focused more on learning how they
race each other, unless on how to be fast and
drive the car. So now I have to switch gears.
(18:55):
Ha ha, No pun intended. Actually that's a lie. There
was definitely a pun intended, and focus on my real life,
my real world racing, which is obviously tarmac as for
track racing, and I have one of the biggest races
of the year coming up, which is obviously the Daytona
Race where I race the AKA car and the NASCAR race.
(19:15):
You know, the big boys do the five hundred, and
there's me and the Arka car, and I'm going to
be learning as much as I can from those guys,
So switching gears, switching mindset, and focusing back on what
I can do in a stock car in order to
prepare me for more down the road. So it's really
important that I learn as much as I can in Daytona.
(19:36):
And I'm as switched on as possible. So kind of
parking again, me and all the puns parking the Chili
Bowl for a minute. And now now I'm home. I've
been gone for two weeks and we were at Prodigy week,
we tested Daytona and then we went straight to the
Chili Bowl. So I've got a pretty quick turnaround in
that I have to get all the grown up house
(19:58):
stuff done here. I'm lucky to have my dad with
me for a week. I have to catch up on
training because as much as I train on the road,
it's never the same as being in your own gym
following a program. And so I have a week at
home where I'm catching up on two weeks worth of
emails and work, catching up on podcasts with you guys,
(20:19):
and then I hit the road for Daytona again, so
I have to call the team. I have to get
my head back in the right frame of mind for that,
and let's focus on putting the programs together for this
year and moving forward, and hopefully we can revisit Chili
Bowl and midget racing down the road. Now I'm going
(20:40):
to leave you until next week. I'm going to go
and do my Daytona prep and some training and we'll
see you then. Thanks for listening to Throttle Therapy. We'll
be back next week with more updates and overtakes. Leave
us a review in Apple Podcasts and tell us us
(21:00):
what you want to talk about. It might just be
the topic for our next show. Throttle Therapy is hosted
by me Katherine Legg. Our executive producer is Jesse Katz.
Our supervising producer is Grace Fus. Listen to Throttle Therapy
on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free
(21:21):
iHeart app and search for throttle Therapy with Catherine Legg
and start listening.
Throttle Therapy with Catherine leg is an iHeart women's sports
production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You
can find us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your podcasts. Hey you guys, and welcome
(00:23):
to this week's episode of Throttle Therapy with Me Catherine Legg.
And this week's episode is special. I say that every week,
but this week, this week's episode is special because I
ran I introduced throstle therapy to the world by running
it on the side of a midget car. And I
did that at the Chili Bowl. And the Chili Bowl
(00:45):
is the super Bowl of midget racing. It's the super
Bowl of dirt track racing. It's the one event that
everybody wants to go to and win this Golden Driller.
It's based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and it's basically who is
who of sprint car racing goes there and there are
some phenomenal drivers. There are over four hundred cars, which
(01:07):
is just bonkers for me to get my head around.
And they cycle through all these heat nights from the
Monday to the Friday, and then everybody goes into the
main races on Saturday, you get so little practice and
so experience counts for a lot. But it's basically in
this big expo center, they truck in all this dirt
and make this quarter mile over out of the dirt
(01:29):
that they wet down, and you drive around it as
fast as you can, and your heat race is making
up as many spots as you can because you get
points based on places, not where you finish, and then
you transfer into C Main, B Main, A Main, and
then you transfer onto the Saturday. So realistically, with that
many cars, you could be in like the S Main
(01:50):
on the Saturday, or you could be in the B Main,
or you know, like there are so many cars and
so many races. So we are going to split this
episode into two parts. First part up until I run
the midget and you hear about that experience, and the
second part will be my race day. So I know
(02:13):
we've already spoken a lot about the Chili Bowl, and
I've introduced you to Brett, the team owner, but now
I'm going to explain to you my thoughts and feelings
after first running the car. So my foray into the
world of midget racing on dirt has begun. I have
(02:34):
now completed my first ever lapse on dirt, my first
ever lapse in a midget car, and I'm very fortunate
to be with one of the best teams, Abacus Racing,
and I have two very good teammates, obviously, one of
which is Santino Frucci I race Cindycar with, and the
other is a young lady called Kaylie Bryson, and she's
well regarded as one of the best midget races in
North America. And so I have this great team of
(02:58):
people around me. I've done my stuf, I've watched video,
I've looked at how to steer the car with the
steering wheel versus steer the car with the gas pedal,
and so midget racing is completely different to anything I've
ever driven before in the terms of the way the
car is the fact that it has absolutely no downforce.
(03:19):
How you sit in the car, the wheel is enormous
and very horizontal, so it feels a little bit like
driving a truck. Your legs go down into the footwell again,
a bit like driving a truck where the brake pedal's
on somewhat of a slider and it pushes down into
the floor, as does the throttle pedal a little bit.
It rotates a little bit round more than the brake pedal.
(03:42):
But it's a very different driving position to be on
top of the car controlling it. And it wants to
be sideways, wants to be sideways always. You've got really
soft tire pressures, You've got a lot of stagger in
the car, so the car wants to be sideways. The
car is asked when you're not totally sideways, but you're
(04:03):
not totally straight either. So I've been watching a lot
of video. I've been watching a lot in the arena
and trying to learn the dance that you have to
do between the steering and the gas. And it seems
to me that when you watch people like Kyle Larson,
who is a masterclass at driving anything, let's be honest,
(04:26):
but especially driving these cars, and you see the little
amount of steering input that he does, and he's all
controlling it with the throttle. And this is completely alien
to me because I've spent thirty years trying not to
go sideways, and now to train my brain to be
comfortable going sideways is a whole other, whole other learning process.
(04:48):
I came into this test very tired because all of
the flights were messed up so we didn't get in
until three thirty in the morning, and then trying to
focus on how to learn a whole a different concept
of racing. And it's a little overwhelming because you don't
want to embarrass yourself, like the whole schedule of being
(05:09):
pushed around and going down the ramp and putting it
in gear and like putting the fuel pressure on before
you switch on and knowing when that is up to
speed and pressure enough to start the car, and then
circulating and like how it all works. It's just you
have to be very focused. And I had so few
(05:31):
laps on my first day of doing it. So you
go out and you do like a three or four
lap run and they check a flag you and then
you wait the remainder of the day and you go
out and you do another three lap run. So you
do a ten second lap at the Chili Bowl. It's
really short. You do two runs, and at the end
of it, you have like less than two minutes of
experience in a midgicica. And these guys are racing sixty
(05:52):
times a year and they're really good, and I have
so much respect for some of them. I mean, they
could literally drive anything. They could shopping trolleys if they
wanted to. And so I'm trying to just go out
there and get fast enough that I don't embarrass myself
so I can go into my heat races and know
that I can learn in those two and work my
(06:13):
way up and hopefully do somewhat decently. Like I'm under
no illusion that I'm going to be in the amine
and be super competitive and have any chance that will win,
although I will say I think my car is capable
of winning. At the moment, I am definitely not. But
I am learning and I'm treating it with the respect
that I think it deserves, and I'm getting to meet
some really cool people, and it's another experience that I
(06:35):
think will make me grow as a driver. And I
think the more things that I can challenge myself with
and the more comfortable I get being uncomfortable, the better
I will be. And so while this is an unnatural
feeling to me right now, by the end of the
chili bowl, I think I will feel like I have
learned and achieved something and I will have gotten exponentially better.
(06:59):
And so I'm very much looking to the point in
time where I feel more comfortable looking through the side
window of the car than I do the front. We're
just going to take a quick break and when we
come back you can hear all about my race day escapades.
(07:27):
So much to tell you guys about the Chili Bowl.
It was and entirely your experience in me one not
without its highs and lows. I have to say it
was an interesting week. I learned a ton. I still
have so much to learn in that kind of car,
(07:49):
and also on Derek. It was overwhelming in a lot
of ways, but it was also a lot of fun
and a big challenge and one that ended in a
little bit of a bad way for me. A little bit,
I mean a lot of a bad way, but still positive,
still looking forward to doing it again one day. So
my week started off where we went to the Arena
(08:12):
and it's an inside Expo center in Tulsa, and it
is the biggest midget race of the year. It is
this flagship star event and they ship this dirt into
this Expo center and we are there for a whole week.
Me and three hundred and eighty something others, most of
(08:35):
them race like sixty times a year and they're really
used to racing on dirt, so little me turning up
thinking I can do this, it was a little bit naive.
I think it was a baptism of fire. And I
turn up on this Sunday, which is when you get
to do your hot lapse, which is effectively what they
call practice, and you get to do two lots of
hot laps, and you get to do two lots of
(08:55):
like four laps, so you're in the car for about
ninety seconds, but you learn what it's all about, how
to be push started, when to run around, when to go,
how everything works. And I was like a deer in
the headlights for that. So the team took me off
site on Wednesday to an outdoor dirt track called Port
(09:21):
City I think it was called, and it was very
similar to the Chili Bowl setup, and we did a
hundred laps and I felt super comfortable and I loved
the team so much. They were great, and I just
I got to know the car and I had so
much fun. But we were there pretty much by ourselves,
so I was running around able to drive this car
(09:42):
totally sideways, bearing in mind I've spent twenty plus years
trying to not go sideways. The biggest mind mess up
that I found was to go faster and to have
more grip, you need to go in harder, which means
(10:03):
you need to go in on the gas pedal because
the more sideways you are, the more side bite in
the tire you have because we run the pressure so
low and these things are really soft, and so in
order to get the car to feel good, you have
to drive it into the corner harder, and so traditionally,
you know, we break all lyft and then we set
the car up, we set the weight in the car,
and then we accelerate through. It's a totally different way
(10:27):
of driving, completely different, but a lot of fun, a
lot of sideways. Not going to be scared of going
sideways anytime soon, but I probably will not be accelerating
through it in either a stock car or an IndyCar,
and so anyway, super comfortable by myself. Then we go
back to the arena for Thursday night, which is my
qualifying night, and in the first heat, which you get
(10:52):
judged on how many people you overtake, so you get
points based on how many people you overtake. You also
get finishing points, but it's mostly passing points. And so
I started off third on the inside and I got
boxed and went back to p last literally midway through
turn one. So at this point I'm like, great, my
week's over. This sucks. I don't know what I could
(11:15):
have done differently. There was nowhere for me to go.
There was a car in front of me, so I'm
like second to last behind the car that boxed me,
and I drive around. It passed one car and I
finished there and I'm thinking this is not going according
to plan. I did not want to make a fall
out of myself or embarrass myself. Although a lot of
people came and said, you know, kudos for attempting it,
so I appreciated that there was a little bit of
(11:36):
respect for actually doing it. I think a lot of
people were trying to see whether I failed or not,
and I don't know whether you would call it a
success or a failure. I mean, I didn't didn't really
put a foot wrong, So in a way, I'm proud
of what I did. So that put me in a
very lowly main final for the Thursday night, and I
(11:59):
did really well. At the beginning of Thursday night, I
was overtaking cars, I was aggressive, we were racy. The
car was really good. The team, as I've said before,
were awesome. The car was amazing, Like I was just
able to have gripe and pass people. Then the yellow
came out and I don't know that I'm happier admitting
this publicly, but I got in my own head and
(12:21):
I started overthinking things, and the more I overthought things,
the worse it got for me. And I got passed
by a couple of cars, so we ended up finishing
fifth instead of third. But overall was a success. So
we roll into Saturday, have Friday off. I feel like
I'm getting sick on Friday. They call it the chili
(12:42):
bowl flu. I woke up on Saturday and I was
absolutely fine, but it was like, I guess, in your head,
like your sinuses get a little bit messed up. So
I was worried that I was getting sick. But nope,
I'm all good. Roll into Saturday and I'm there early
Saturday morning because like I'm eager to go, it's go time.
I am determined to make my way through as many
(13:03):
of these heat races as possible. Obviously, I didn't qualify
very well from my night of racing, so I'm like
third or fourth race. I'm thinking, Okay, I can get
through at least two or three of these. This is
gonna be awso'm going to make my way to the front.
Unfortunately it was not to be, so I was feeling
pretty racy. I went to the outside to overtake a
(13:24):
couple of cars at the start, and that gap just
got taken away from me by the car in front
bearing in mind lesson learn on my part, because you
don't have mirrors, you don't have spotters, so you don't
know where the other cars are. And in a way,
he was totally within his rights to take whichever line
he wanted. I just wasn't expecting it because everybody went
to the inside. So I ended up climbing his rear
(13:47):
wheel with my front left tire his right rear and
flipping into the fence and then pretty high in the air,
and I think I rolled it about three or four times,
came down on its roof. I have to say I
saw Santino, my teammate, roll it twice the night before
and get out like it was nothing. And then I
see literally every other heat rate somebody's rolling it and
(14:10):
getting out like it was nothing. So I thought ah,
these cars are designed to do that. It's fine. It's
not fine. It hurts. So I got out and I
have got bruce knees and bang my head pretty good.
But I am actually fine. It was just knock the
wind out of me. When you flip a chili ball cart,
(14:32):
it looks totally like a monster truck flip. They are
designed for it. They have the roll cages in them,
and it looks like no big deal, like when you're
watching it now. I have flipped a car before. It's
a lot more of a bigger deal when you're going
at faster speeds and when the cars are not designed
(14:53):
for it. Now, luckily, we are living in twenty twenty
five and the safety of all these vehicles is amazing. Honestly,
be a chili bowl car, an IndyCar, a sports car,
stock car, whatever it is, they're designed to withstand crazy crashes,
(15:14):
and I've been very lucky. I actually, if you type
Catherine Leg into Google, you will see the biggest crash
you've ever seen before. In two thousand and six, I
climbed the fence in an IndyCar at one hundred and
eighty miles an hour and that was epics. So I
feel I feel like I've got nine lives, and I
feel like I've used at least four or five of them,
(15:38):
and I don't enjoy it in any way, shape or form.
It's funny because Tom, a gentleman that I coach in
a Porsche, he says that he enjoys crashing and it's
like an adrenaline rush for him. I'm like, are you crazy.
I literally get out of the car and I want
to cry, but there's no crying and racing, so there's
(15:58):
no way I would actually cry race track. I've trained
myself over the years not to but the emotion and
the outlet that you feel is just it's a big deal.
It's awful. So don't want to do that again. But
I again walked away from it, and so I think
it's just testament to the strength of the cars. But
(16:20):
it's never pleasant. In my experience, it hasn't put me off.
I still I'm just I'm kind of gutted, honestly, because
I really wanted to prove my metal and make my
way through a few of those heats, like like Santino did,
and prove that I do have a modicum of natural
talent that I can go and jump in anything and
(16:41):
do something like that. But obviously I didn't get to
prove that, so I feel like there's some unfinished business there.
So sitting here now, if I was Catherine from the past,
(17:05):
if I was one week ago Catherine, I would probably
be able to avoid the inevitable demise of my midget
my midget race, because I think in hindsight, and hindsight's
always twenty twenty, and it's always easier to look back
and say, well, you didn't learn enough, or you didn't
do this. I think it's a lesson for moving forward.
(17:29):
I sat there at the Chili Bowl and I watched
hours of racing, trying to learn from everybody else, and
I saw hundreds, not just tens, but hundreds of flips,
and they're very much all where you either climbed the
wall or climbed another car. And if I had put
(17:50):
two and two together and made four and actually thought
about it, then I would have realized that going to
the outside was the most dangerous place to put yourself,
especially at the start, and it would be really easy
to climb somebody else's wheel if they balked at any
point in time. So I think if I had actually
had that thought on that process, and maybe maybe I
(18:12):
need to ask myself more questions going into these new things.
I mean, I asked a ton of questions of other people,
and I knew that it's easy to climb the wheel,
but it wasn't one of those things that I focused on.
So I think, again, hindsight's always twenty twenty. I would
probably have avoided that. I think the preparation for everything else,
you just go at your own pace. So I don't
(18:33):
think I would have changed that. I pushed it as
hard as I could, and I think just driving I
was fine, But the racing is a whole new ballgame.
It is a ball ring out there, and so I
think I would have focused more on learning how they
race each other, unless on how to be fast and
drive the car. So now I have to switch gears.
(18:55):
Ha ha, No pun intended. Actually that's a lie. There
was definitely a pun intended, and focus on my real life,
my real world racing, which is obviously tarmac as for
track racing, and I have one of the biggest races
of the year coming up, which is obviously the Daytona
Race where I race the AKA car and the NASCAR race.
(19:15):
You know, the big boys do the five hundred, and
there's me and the Arka car, and I'm going to
be learning as much as I can from those guys,
So switching gears, switching mindset, and focusing back on what
I can do in a stock car in order to
prepare me for more down the road. So it's really
important that I learn as much as I can in Daytona.
(19:36):
And I'm as switched on as possible. So kind of
parking again, me and all the puns parking the Chili
Bowl for a minute. And now now I'm home. I've
been gone for two weeks and we were at Prodigy week,
we tested Daytona and then we went straight to the
Chili Bowl. So I've got a pretty quick turnaround in
that I have to get all the grown up house
(19:58):
stuff done here. I'm lucky to have my dad with
me for a week. I have to catch up on
training because as much as I train on the road,
it's never the same as being in your own gym
following a program. And so I have a week at
home where I'm catching up on two weeks worth of
emails and work, catching up on podcasts with you guys,
(20:19):
and then I hit the road for Daytona again, so
I have to call the team. I have to get
my head back in the right frame of mind for that,
and let's focus on putting the programs together for this
year and moving forward, and hopefully we can revisit Chili
Bowl and midget racing down the road. Now I'm going
(20:40):
to leave you until next week. I'm going to go
and do my Daytona prep and some training and we'll
see you then. Thanks for listening to Throttle Therapy. We'll
be back next week with more updates and overtakes. Leave
us a review in Apple Podcasts and tell us us
(21:00):
what you want to talk about. It might just be
the topic for our next show. Throttle Therapy is hosted
by me Katherine Legg. Our executive producer is Jesse Katz.
Our supervising producer is Grace Fus. Listen to Throttle Therapy
on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free
(21:21):
iHeart app and search for throttle Therapy with Catherine Legg
and start listening.
Host
Katherine Legge
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