Welcome to Good Game with Sarah Spain, where we're rubbing our engines and relishing in the fresh scent of burnt rubber and gasoline. It's Tuesday, April twenty ninth. That on the rest of our shows this week, we'll be doing something a little different. We're going to introduce you to some of the many wonderful shows on the Iheartwomen's Sports Network. Today we're bringing you an episode of Throttle Therapy with Catherine Legg.
I had the.
Pleasure of talking to the motorsport pioneer and twenty year pro racing vet on our January twenty second show, but today we want to bring you an episode of her podcast Uninterrupted. To prepare you for what you're about to hear, we ask Catherine to tell us a little bit about her show.
Take a listen. Hey, Hey, this is Catherine Legg and I am the host of the podcast Throttle Therapy. It will give you an inside of you of the mind and the life of a female race card driver in a male dominated arena, and we interview and speak with a bunch of influential people within the racing world, but also my friends and family. So you get a glimpse of what it's like to be the only female driver in a sea of men, and what my everyday life is like and what my life is like on track.
We also asked what to expect from the episode that we're about to air. Her conversation with Lynn Saint James from March eighteenth.
I absolutely adore this episode. It's with a very good friend of mine, lind Sent James. She is an absolute legend. For those of you who don't know her, she opened the door and broke the glass ceilings for all of the female race CLU drivers that came after her. There was really only two or three before her, and it was in a time when it was really tough to break into male dominated arenas. So she is one of the many reasons that we are able to do what we love today.
Thanks so much to Catherine. I think we're more than ready for the episode now. And by the way, before we go to break here, I just I have to say something. Catherine raced in the NASCAR Xfinity Series race at Rockingham Speedway on April nineteenth, and she was involved in a crash on the fifty second lap that took her and fellow driver Casey Caine out she was eliminated from the race. Cain lost a lap but recovered to
finish fourteenth overall. Now, after the fact, Catherine received a disgusting amount of hate mail and death threats from auto racing fans, even though she didn't start the crash, and she addressed it head on in the April twenty second episode of her podcast Bottle Therapy, saying quote, let me be very clear, I'm here to race, and I'm here to compete, and I won't tolerate any of these threats to my safety or to my dignity, whether that's on
track or off of it. She went on to say, quote, Luckily, I have been in tougher battles than you guys in the comment sections.
End quote.
And I just want to say, anybody who played a role in the hate and the vitriol sent Catherine's way, it is neither surprising nor novel to see a woman in a male dominated field get an outsized amount of hate. But that doesn't make it any less infuriating. And I have to say I loved seeing longtime racer Marco Andretti call out the trolls.
He posted quote.
It's wild to me how many grown men talk badly about badass girls like this. Does it make them feel more manly from the couch or something as usual? And as we've seen over and over over again, game recognize this game. So anyway, now that we're done addressing that bullshit, the episode of Throttle Therapy with Lynd Saint James is coming up right after this.
Throttle Therapy with Catherine Legg 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, Welcome to Throttle Therapy with me Katherine Legg. I've obviously come off a pretty rough first NASCAR weekend. It was a long week and I've got a lot of work to do too for redemption and to come back. But I'm going to take a few days with my very good friend
Kara Chris Dolin. She is the head engineer for Bridgestone Firestone Racing in North America. We've been friends for a very long time and we're going to go and let our hair down and do some skiing this weekend, so that will be a lot of fun. This week we
are talking to the wonderful Lencent James. Lynn is a legend who came up through the racing ranks a little bit before me, when it was a little bit harder, and she definitely was breaking barriers and glass ceilings and has dedicated her life to the pursuit of women in motorsport and she's become a very good friend of mine, a sounding board and as I said before, an absolute legend. Hi, Lindca and James, how are you hello?
Well, locut you, I'm just glad to be a you know, I've been watching these and I'm like, I wonder if she'll ever reach out to me and write.
Of course you're on the list, like pretty early on, I think it was who do you want to go on the podcast? And I think your name was like first or second after my dad. So I want to actually start off before I get you to tell everybody what you've achieved in your momentous like career. I want to start off with a little story about how you and I met and then I will let you take
it from there. But from my perspective, I reached out to you as a young race card driver in England when you were doing a shootout for the Indie Lights series back in the day. I think it was like two thousand and four, and you were doing it with Catherine Nunn, Monan's wife. You were helping her to run a team in Indie Lights, and you wanted to find the next female race car driver stuff. So I've read about this in England. I read about this, and so I reached out to Lindsay James and I said, Hi,
my name's Catherine Legg. I'm the best girl race card driver you'll ever see ever. Can I come and be part of your shootout please? And I got an email back saying never heard of you, and and I said, okay, can I come and watch then? And I bought my helmet and I got on a plane and I showed up. I think that was in Phoenix. Was that not in Phoenix,
That was in Texas. You're right, it was Texas. And I met you, and I met Catherine, and I met the team, and I did the shootout and I won the won the event, and then unfortunately the sponsorship didn't happen and it fell through. But that's how I got to know about you and your program of helping young female drivers and then I kind of became part of it, and after that the rest is history. We became friends, and you've obviously been somebody that I can go to
for advice and help and everything since. But i've known you for now over twenty years.
Then absolutely, But I'm going to now tell the story you had a couple of those weeks. They aren't quite accurate, of course, your memory and my memory are just different, but you had it right until.
My response was not that I know I was being funny.
My response was that Catherine is making the decisions, Catherine Nunn and not me. And I went to Catherine and she said no, because you're coming all the way from England. And she, you know, I had a hard time convincing her because she just wanted who's the best driver in and she was just going to go with that. I said, the best way is to do the shootout, and as it turned out, we got a lot of publicity around the shootout, and I said, well, i'll help you would
give you a list. You weren't on the list because I didn't know you existed. You contacted me. I then added that to the list, and she said no, because you're coming over from England and what if you don't get it? Blah blah blah. When I saw the lineup, I contacted you. I said, you get your butt over here.
Yeah you did, and you did and you did.
You showed up. You know they are because it was a multi day test and you showed up and you did win. And it wasn't the sponsorship fell through. She just pulled the plug.
Oh really, I heard that that was the money and the money didn't come through.
Well, that may be it, but I think it was not too long after that Boat shut his team down. So I think you know that there was anyway. Maybe it was sponsorship, but I was only and Catherine just said I'm not going to do it.
So the other girl that was there, I say, girl, she's a woman now was Sarah McCune. I often think I wonder she was the only other one I think that was being considered at the time. I wonder what happened to her. Have you ever heard anything from her to said.
No, I haven't you know. And there's so many like that that came to my driver development program. Or it's like Katherine Sarah mcune, and it's like I had no idea. In most cases, I have no idea what happened to them, but you know, I think of her because I also think like Kaylee Bryson and some of the other gals
that are doing midgets and sprint cards. You know that that's there was a Sarah McCune, you know, and she was kind of a contemporary with Sarah Fisher, but Sarah Fisher was still not on the horizon yet.
So I want to actually talk about the driver development and like what that's changed into and what you're doing now. But first of all, I was at Daytona this year for when you were honored, and there were things in that presentation that even I, being a Lindsea James fan and a friend of yours for a number of years,
did not know. And so I wanted you to give our listeners the same experience that I had during that presentation in a way, and tell them all the incredible things, starting at the beginning, how you got started in racing. You don't have to go into great detail. You can do the cliff note version, but I want them to know lyns epic like you're a badass, like I had,
I only knew about fifty percent of it. Honestly, I know, it's a tool order in a big ospit stop from the beginning and just give us a brief but expensive overview of everything that you achieved.
Well, it's interesting because again I think people that are IndyCar fans, and because Indy is so big, it's like, oh, they know what I did at Indy, right, And then the people that are a sports car people, you know, imps of people a sports car. The decade of the eighties was really my ims A decade, so sometimes they don't overlap. But it started in the seventies where just
an SCCA. So I just started as an amateur, went to driver school, got my competition license, started out in a Ford Pinto, moved up to a Cosworth Vega, and all I wanted to be was the national champion. I mean to me, I just wanted to be a national champion in SCCA. Went to the runoffs in a Cosworth Vega, blew an engine, had driven the car to the track, had no backup, carn, no nothing. I didn't have a you know, engine builder or anybody that I was dead, you know, even though I and.
You didn't come from money either, No, no, no, no, no exactly, so you did it clawed from the from the ground up.
Yeah yeah, yeah yeah. And I mean we had an auto parts business and I sold shock absorbers, and we had another consumer electronics business, and you know, we were just two people trying to make a living. Who became we were both car guys. Car you know, he took me to the DY five hundred and on my second date, and you know, it's.
That's a good that's a good second that he did well then, So you know.
Then I went to the twenty four hours of Daytona as a spectator for the first time after I moved to Florida to start the business with him, and I had never seen sports car racing or endurance racing or anything like that, and it totally totally I mean I just got hooked. And I went to Seabury, became a member of SCCA, found out you had to go to school to get a competition license, and that's how it all started on my own dollars. And then a couple
of things happened. I mean, I do believe someone in you know, there's tipping points, there's destiny whatever you want, and then there's you work hard to get into your destiny. But I saw an article and Car and Driver magazine
that was about a Ford product. But there was a sidebar article and it was entitled Ford and Feminism, and it said how for this was in nineteen seventy eight, and how Ford Motor Company wanted to create support and create opportunities for women in non traditional areas within the company. And so I figured that they needed me because I could demonstrate that that commitment was alive out to the public,
you know. So I wrote them letters that I wrote them letters for three years trying to get a meeting, and I did get a meeting, but not until nineteen eighty. But in nineteen seventy eight I also got a deal. I was contacted the only time I've been contacted by a team owner or a car owner when wrote Atlanta was bought by the Whittingtons. I mean, this is kind of good trivia stuff.
This is this is stuff I didn't know either. Yeah, I'm learning.
Where was a deal when they bought that track? There was this old Plymouth Malare in one of the garages or shops, and this guy in Oklahoma, brand dole knew about it. He bought the car. He contacted MS, talked to John Bishop and asked if there's a woman driver, because Kelly's Services had just decided to sponsor a new series called The Kelly American Challenge and John Bishop. I was told this by John Bishop, gave him my name, gave him my number and said she's the best one.
She drives like a man, and he cons a compliment, and it was meant to be a compliment really, So I raised that season. It cost three thousand dollars. I had to buy the ride for three thousand dollars, so I had to borrow. My husband wouldn't give it to me. I had to borrow three thousand dollars from a friend.
And then because I finished second seventy nine hundreds of a second behind Jane Felton and was the top female driver, I won like thirty five hundred dollars, so I could pay this thought thousand of dollars back to the guy that and I had a whole lot at five hundred dollars.
So you didn't share it with your husband, saying he was too tired.
I's pretty mad at him at that point. So I ran that whole season on that same kind of a deal. Then they had a bonus prize money at the end of the year, he got all that, the owner got all the prize money, and I was so excited that maybe the next year I would be able to go for the whole championships overall. And that's what he told me. I mean, I'm going to tell you this. You know what he told me. I'm gonna forget this. It was the finale that the finale used to be an at Daytona,
like around Thanksgiving weekend. So I'm having a meeting with this car owner and I'm excited because I was in People magazine. I could go into that because I raced over at the derber Ring and had won the race and he was in the picture, and so I figured, I made this guy a hero, right, And I am sitting with him ready to have a meeting to negotiate the fact that I'm going to run the next season. And he said, I'm not running next year. I said, what do you mean, You're not running next year? My
wife thinks we're having an affair. Oh Jesus, And that's what he told me. I looked at him like, you have got to be kidding me. And so I had no deal the next year. So that's what I and I was already talking to Ford, and I finally got a meeting with Ford, and I ran races. I ran one Offs, I ran seaver Ring, I ran Daytona. I ran in an acid Martin Nimrod. I mean, I just did whatever I could do to get in a race car.
I mean, I remember showing up relate to the test in the first of the year at Daytona, which is now called the Roar. It used to just be an open test. I would showed up because I lived in Florida. I'd show up my helmet and suit and everything. And Jim Bell was at the party that you're talking about on October thirtieth. I invited him because he was there running the Whittingtons in a nine to thirty five and
they were testing before the twenty four. And I walked up to him and introduced myself and I said, you know, I'm really looking for a ride. I don't know what the hell I said. Jim came up to me maybe two or three hours later, and he said, hey, you bring your gear. I said, I sure did. He said, oh, Bill Whittington wants to borrow it. I was like, I mean, my face went from being excited to them being and then he looked at me and he laughed and he said,
I'm only kidding. Gear up, Bill Don Whittington is going to leave, and he said, you could serve some laps. I got to turn it lapse at a nine thirty five at that test.
That's cool.
And I remember when I sat in that car. I mean I had the most powerful thing I'd ever raced was a Corvette and I sat in this nine thirty five and I just remember two things. One I sat there after I got all hit, you know, I got all suited up. I'm sitting in the car and now I'm not moving. Jim puts the door down, closes the door, and I'm looking for the starter button and he opens the door and he goes, what are you waiting for? I said, I don't know how to start it. He said,
turn the key. Porsches have it the key? Yeah, like rather a starter button because it was basically a street car that they turned into a race car that I think nine thirty five. And then he looked at me and he said, I'm gonna just give you one piece of advice. Either you drive it or it's going to drive you. Good advice because that turbo comes on and you've got so much power and you don't feel it until it comes on. Because of that ride, I got to race a nine thirty five at the Twelve Hours
of Seabrey that year. So I mean you just scrape and dig I said, you always be at the track, Always have your gear, Always talk to people. Always let people know who you are, what you've done, and how how much you want to do it.
You know, show them you're just why am I still doing that then?
Because you have Catherine? I mean, I think unless you've got an agent or somebody that's out there doing it for you. And there's a couple of the galps today I know that do that. I mean they have somebody representing them, and that representative hopefully has a good relationship and a good reputation and talks to the ker chiefs or team managers and so I didn't have that back then. But the reality is, there are so many more race
car drivers than there are seats available. I don't care what series you're telling about, And the higher up you go, the harder that is, the more drivers there are those than they're exactly, So somebody's got to be speaking up there. Letting them know what you can do. So I spent the decade of the eighties racing for Ford. I wanted to share some of those only because I just didn't even think about it. They just came out of how they happened. And you know Ford, I bugged them for
three years for sponsorship. I finally got it. I ran the Kelly Series and then I raced whatever Ford told me to race. I mean, the good news is I got in the door. I had to. I negotiated my own deals. I had one year contracts, but I always wanted to do the endurance races, and sometimes that didn't include the endurance races. You know, so I just I just I just raced whatever the hell I could race. I mean, it really was. They had me drive an off road.
Pickup truck, and they at least pay you good money.
Well, they didn't pay me. The only time I got money when I ran my own car the first year. What I realized was that a I'm not a good team owner or team manager. I can't do this. I can't wear both hats. So I went back and renegotiated during that year for a personal service contract. So I had a racing contract and I had a personal service contract. Smartly any the racing contract, that money went to the team.
I didn't get any right, yeah, the personal service contract, and I went from making I had to guarantee fifty appearances a year, which is a lot. Besides that's a lot, but I needed to make some money, you know, even though I had my own horse business, and whatever money I was making, I was also using it to get these other rides.
Ford was get yourself there and accommodation and everything else.
I'm guessing, yeah, yeah, And I'm very proud of the fact that how much I was making for the first couple of years per a day for appearance based on because I had fifteen years of one year contracts and every year I've negotiated.
And made a little bit more money.
I was building value, you know, because of I mean it was a win win. They were winning because of the success I was having on the racetrack. I was winning because of the success I was having, and because I was involved with Ford Butter Company, and I was actually starting to make a little more money. And so you know, all of the pieces kind of went up. The records at Talladega that I did. I convinced Ford that we needed to do that. I pitched Ford to
do that the first time. It was in the Ford Probe, because I wanted to race the Ford Probe and I was racing the Mustangs, and the head of Ford Racing was this German by the name of Michael Crnifice who a didn't want me on the team but had to because of the Ford's sponsorship. I came with the Ford sponsorship. B didn't think that I, I mean, he didn't want a woman on the team, and he didn't think I was good enough. And I wanted to drive the big car. I wanted to drive the big car. I wanted to
drive the Ford Probe. So I thought, well, if I can take that car around Talladega and go at two hundred and twenty or two and thirty miles an hour, then I'm going to convince him that I can drive that race car. And so I did. I didn't go that fast on and went to a four. But and the next season I got to race the Probe, and then I saw Ford was directing more and more towards a NASCAR so I decided maybe I should try to
convince them that I should go NASCAR. Racing, because what's different between a NASCAR and a big Ford Bustang gt O car, you know?
So I didn't know.
I learned. So I convinced them to take the Ford Thunderbird, which was a brand new supercoop body that they were coming out for the for their production car. And I went to Talladega to break the records that I'd already set and break my own records and a bunch of more. I convinced Bill Elliott and his team to build the car and we went and successfully went to twelve average speed. But Catherine, I hated that car. Why hated it? It was numb.
Oh didn't get any feedback.
This is in nineteen eighty eight, so they were a lot different than they are now. I turned the wheel and nothing happens, And I mean it was numb. It is the best way I could put it. And I spent two days and I couldn't wait till it was over. Three weeks later, I got an opportunity to drive an IndyCar for the first time, and I made up my mind in October of nineteen eighty eight, if I'm going to climb this mountain, it's going to be that mountain and not trying to get into stock cars.
Not a numb race car either, Like at least you get feedback from that one.
Oh yeah, you know. I mean lots of feedback obviously. I mean the first time, the first time in the IndyCar is it Memphis? It was, which is a drag strip that they do a lot of testing. At the very first lab. I go around and I come down the front straight away, and I thought, okay, I go really fast down the front straight away because I you know, And then I put my foot on the brake to go through turn one, and I'm not used to having brakes that work like that. The car literally stopped on
the racetrack. I had to put it in first scare to drive down to the corner.
Was like, oh my god, So you'd never driven anything with downforce before that moment.
I driven an open wheel car twice before. I raced in the June Sprints in a Formula Ford in like nineteen eighty two, and I had raced here at Phoenix in a like what would be equal to a Formula Atlantic car in a in a support race when they had the Formula One race downtown Phoenix. Those are the only two times i'd ever been in an open wheel car?
Wow, did you want to do Formula One? If you were in the support? Did do you ever have the never?
No? You know they used to because Jackie Stewart was also a Ford spokesperson, so they would you know, always hit and Ford for a while actually owned a Formula One team. And I mean I looked at that and what that's way over my I mean, that's so complicated, and now it's even more complicated. And I also knew, you know, all my goals were doable for me. Everything I did that I set as a goal, I thought, it's because I know I can do it, and I think I can convince others. Formula one, I knew there
was no way. Well, I try to chase something that you just know there's absolutely no way.
Yeah, it has to be achievable. I think though, had you found racing as a kid and done go cutting and done everything like that, I think it would have been achievable. It was just the circumstance that you came
into it. But I mean, what a career. It reminds me a little bit of mine in a way in that you raced anything and everything that you got the opportunity to race, and if you look at the long list, like I did when we were at that thing at Daytona in the museum there, it was so cool, honestly, Like it still gives me goosebumps to think about that, because like when you see how much you jumped around from different cars and what you achieved, and like just
the tenacity and the and the grit and everything. I mean, it's honestly it's inspirational because you don't really meet many people like us, right, Like it's I think we're definitely a different breed and for me to be able to see it and you, it gives me some power back too, you know, like it's it's been. It's been a wild ride, and I know that we did things very differently in a way, but it's really neat to see that there are so many different parallels too.
Yeah. I mean I think I've told people, I mean, a, you have more natural talent than I do. I mean, I absolutely watching the way you stepped in that test, you know that would have been indie lights and see you and see you run. I've watched you a lot run in in sports cars in Daytona and all that and I just you have a lot of natural ability and you're willing to work hard. I mean, that's that's a lot of times people that have a lot of natural ability are lazy. You know that it comes easy
to them and they don't work very hard. So and you know, the passion that you have, I feel we have that very much in common. And also just the stick to itiveness, not to be not to give up, you know, doesn't mean we don't get disappointed or discouraged or you know, there's times I've been, oh my god, there's so many times that I've either wanted to kill somebody or or quit, you know, because I figured there's
no way. But I never that didn't stay around for very long, and you know I wouldn't be I just nobody was going to deny me.
I feel like I said a blund But what would you do if you did, if you weren't racing.
You know, it's funny. I met Burkup and I don't know how to pronounce your last thing, but she's from Turkey and she's the new head of the FA Woman and Motorsports Commission. Lovely lady. She came over for our summit in Indianapolis and December, and she's she's probably inter four, I think, you know, I mean, yeah, she does, but she's not like really young, you know what I mean, She's not just twenty or thirty years old or whatever. But so we kind of related in a different way.
But I remember her saying, so what do you do? What do you mean? What do I do? Like, well, what do you do for fun? I'm like, I don't have any nothing. I mean, I paint, I tried to paint, so I have painted a little bit. But I look for other opportunities. I mean, at that time, I was still vintage racing. I mean I was, you know, I was planning to continue vintage racing until I had that
back crash in nineteen. So or I'm at the races, staying current, learning, I'm reading about it, I'm going to race, and still I go to races because that's the only way I can stay current, and I and the and the fact that there are so many more young gals racing now. I want to be able to watch them race because if I don't see them race, and I don't have this opportunity to see them, like this, anything I read is almost irrelevant.
Yeah, it's not accurate.
I've got to feel that energy, I have to see that passion, and I have to see some damn talent in the car. So I am an observer or participant, a fan, and I try to continue to be an expert and to be able to be a mentor. To do that, you have to stay current.
Do you like cause as much as you like racing or is it more of racing, because I remember seeing something with Anika that said she was like, I have no interesting cars really at all. I just love racing as a sport, and I feel like I can relate to I love cars too, but not to the extent that I love racing. I think it's the sport that I fell in love with rather than the cars.
I'm kind of curious about cars, and I know what I like and what I don't like. That I'm not a car nut. The other thing is it isn't even just the racing. It's the driving something at the limit, finding the limit, and then being able to do it. I like testing more than I like racing. The only reason why the racing's fun is because that's what you're really You're pitted against you know where the hell you stand.
But testing you also know where you stand. You know what a good time is there, you know, you know, But I love the testing because I love trying to find that perfect flap, that perfect corner, you know, every time. I mean, that's what excites me is that, Yeah, the sound, the smell being at the track and then looking for that apex for every corner and feeling the car and feeling how it changes, you know, how the tires change
and how the weight balance changes. And it's like when I drove that Indy car at Memphis, I was so pleased. Dick said to the guy that was working on the car, put ten gallons of fuel, bring her in, Let her do ten laps, ten gallons of He wanted to keep that the weight of the car balanced and the same almost for the entire time because those weight changes really make a difference, you know. So I just because I didn't know what the hell I was doing at that point.
So anyway, I love the driving the race car. I'm a good time. I'm a real good test driver because I was told that by some tire engineers because if they want, if they're going to change tires, they don't want you to adapt. They want you to still drive the way you got.
And it's not that easy to get the perfect that, like, you can chase the perfect lab forever and ever because the conditions are always changing and the tires are always changing, you're always changing its cars getting lighter when it blends off fuel. And so yeah, I don't think that anybody anywhere ever has ever got the perfect lab. And you know what, you see the self driving cars these days that are supposed to be able to be programmed to do like the edge of the grip if you like.
I think maybe one day that will take over from us. But I think that that's what makes us more interesting. Like I have something that can go at the ultimate limit without making mistakes. It's the mistakes and it's the
learning and everything that makes it interesting. But I love the competition to you like the competition with yourself as much as with everybody else, right because mentally you're competing with yourself to be as good as you can be and then yeah, no hitting those marks, making as few mistakes as possible, driving on the limit, all of it.
But yeah, I love it too, and it's a passion and I don't know what I will do when I stop racing because I love it so much, but I almost think that I want to follow in your footsteps and help other young female drivers too. So I'm just following you all the way up through. I'm just being a meanie, a mini you.
I've heard you're rid of here from Predix. Yeah, you were saying that. So I mean, if you ever want to brainstarve about that, my dear, I'm happy to do that. Yeah, I mean, I think your passion kid, carry on past your time in the race car.
Explain to us how you started your program, because I didn't go through it in its entirety, I was lucky enough to be part of it at times. But explain why you started it, Explain what it was and some of the people who came through it. For those of us listening.
Well, I started in the nineteen ninety four, so two years after I did INDY, but I was still doing Indy.
Okay, you were still driving at the time you started it. Yeah, that's interesting because I was thinking to myself, I'll wait until the transition point so i can focus, because I've got like OCD where I want to put everything in its neat and tidy box. But you were doing both at the same time, which is crazy and awesome.
But remember I was doing Indy only, so I mean I only did I did fifteen IndyCar races over nine years. The only year I had more than Indy was ninety three and I had six races, Okay, So when I was back to just one, I mean, to be honest, I had to put it this way. It was like, oh,
I'm going to do the rest of the year. I wanted to do more, and I was trying to get sponsors to do more, but ultimately, you know, I only had an indie only program, and you know, after hanging out with Billy Jim King for those years that I went to the Women's Sports Foundation, I realized I have to find a way to give back, a way to make a difference. And then I got so much fan mail. A lot of them were young drivers wanting advice. I'm like, I don't know who these people are. I don't know
if they're any good. And I was also being interviewed a lot saying that there were more coming and they're like, well, then where are they. I'm like, I don't know. I got to find them. So my deal was an invitation only, and I literally would I would scour National speed Sport news every week and look at all the race results and look for stories about a woman driver looking for you know, and I only had usually the first initial in the last names, you know. I mean, it was
really hard sometimes. And this was before we had the Internet and you know, Google and all of that. But I literally would and I started contacting sanctioning bodies asking for who do you know? Is there anybody any good that's running at your track? So I created a program once a year. I would only do it once a year. I would max out at twenty people because I could never remember more than twenty names over the course of a weekend. I don't want to keep looking at name tags.
Yeah.
And I had a vision, Catherine, of everything that it took me so long to learn, and I thought, if I can compress the learning time that these gals that are out there racing and give them the tools that in my mind they were like, go now they should go, because now they shouldn't be held back by these things that we don't know, because you don't know what you don't know, you know, doctor Jacques Dhlaire, Because I'd gone, you know, with them, I'd worked with them, since nineteen
eighty eight, and truly was it.
By the way, Yes, I saw him at Seabring. I still yeah, it's amazing.
But if I hadn't met he and his partner at that time, doctor Don Marsi, who has since passed away from a heart attack. If I hadn't met the two of them in nineteen eighty eight, that changed my physical fitness, changed my mental preparation, changed by how I think, how
it changed everything about me. It took a while. I was a hard one to convince, Oh no, are you really, I can tell you in ninety two at Indy, I would have not been able to do what I did in ninety two at Indy had it not been for doctor Shock the training and I could go on and on. I could do a whole session anyway. So I asked doctor Joe.
Should by the way, we should point out to the business that Jacques de Laire is a mental coach. If they know who he is.
He's actually a sports physiologist. His training is in the physical part. But his partner with psychologists. There was the brain guy in the body guy. But when when the brain guy died, he had so much information from them that he was able to Boorf and really develop that expertise.
But he is available. It's called human performance. Now I think performance, I mean because I think every race car driver should have somebody good to help them train their brain because we are our worst enemies most of the time. And then I had the whole We went to a gym and I was It was in Indianapolis where I went and met with people at the gym, and I explained to them the stuff that we had to test. Cardiovascular strength, flexibility, grip strength. We had a grip strength
so we had a whole training physical training. They'd go through this whole exercise with doctor Jock. On the mental part of it, I hired a camera crew. They had to be interviewed so that they could learn about media training. And then every night at dinner, I had a nutritionist prepare all the meals and so that they could learn what they're supposed to eat, whether on the road or whatever.
Every night at dinner, I would pull a name out of a hat and they didn't know who they were going to who was going to get pulled that night, and they had to get up and give a speech. Because as a race driver, when you're invited to go to dinner and then say, oh, tell it, tell the table, you know, I mean, and most people aren't really good at that, you know, and.
So nope, oh that's scared of it.
I mean I was, Yeah, I mean I used to used to break out in a rash if I had to talk more than three people. So there was media training, there was nutritional training, there was the physical training. There was and then we went to the racetrack and I had go carts. Everybody started in go carts because I had to see could they really were they really able to be a race car driver? And if they passed the go kart test, then different years I would have
different cars. I mean when I was out here, I did it at Bob Vodra, and so then we'd have openheel cars and then we'd have closed wheel cars, and you know, so there was on track. There was one day of on track programming. So with four days, I required one family member or one responsible person that's in their life attend with them. So this wasn't like where you drop the kids off and then go off somewhere. Because I wanted the parents, because in most cases kids
were still living at home. I wanted the parents to hear everything that we told them. So I did that. I had over two hundred and thirty drivers from thirty states in six countries. So we did it at Daytona, we did it at Charlotte, we did it at Indianapolis, and we did it in Phoenix. Over that twenty plus years, and I could count on one hand out of that two hundred and thirty of who were really good.
Okay, who's the one that didn't make it that was really good and should have made it?
Oh my god. Her first name is Alison. She was really good, and I was so pissed off because I mean she just sort of she did some racing after that, and then she dropped off the radar, and I was asking somebody, I forget who, it's a long time ago, what happened to Alison? She got married and she got married like a screw chief guy that works in NASCAR. So she was really good, and I was disappointed. But I mean, Danica Sarah, Milanie Troxel, actually Erica Anders came
through the program. Aaron Crocker. I was trying to think, well, for sure, Aaron was really good.
I mean, yeah, I'm surprised she didn't do more I thought she was to be the one, honestly, yeah.
And she could have been, but you know what happened there, so I finally have forgiven Ray. I wasn't for the longest time.
I was. It worked out for them in the end, That's exactly just I.
Was just with them and Kate, you know. So yeah, I mean there is a certain I mean, Shaye Holbrook was also an outstanding and the part of it was they were really good and then they also took what we were telling them and at least started to incorporate it into their program. I mean, things like writing thank you notes for the people that help you, you know, the returning phone calls. Of course now it's emails and everything.
But I mean I had like Linda Conti came in and would talk about finances, talk about how to manage your find what are you going to do if you actually get sponsorship. I had John Bickford, which is Jeff Gordon's Oh Sarah. He recommended Sarah Fisher to come. He actually paid for Sarah. I charged five hundred dollars, by the way, five hundred dollars for four days.
That's really good.
And that's what I did through my foundation. I raised money to help because I had to pay for all of the resources that we had, you know. But I just the way I looked at it is that it was mostly the off track tools that you need to be successful, because if you're running sprint cars or you're running drag racinger, you know, every one of those, the on track part is different, but the off track part
is the same. To sort of clarify, women in motorsports in North America is about all disciplines of racing for all careers, for women in all careers in racing, which is important, very important.
Racing is not just about us as drivers, even though we're inherently selfish. I think it is about the engineers and the mechanics, and the teams and the series and the sponsors and like this, so many other aspects.
Yeah, because that will help generate more support for the women drivers because now they'll see that this is actually, you know, women can be successful in this industry. That it will kind of help break some you know down. But I also I have not given up on women race cars driver. So I mean there's still me who is passionate about wanting to figure out what you just said,
how can we get more women winning. I mean, that's I want to see that desperately, and that I'm not expecting women Motorsports North America to be that solution necessarily, you know, I just sometimes I want to defend the fact that I want a woman to win.
I don't think you need to defend it. I think I want it to and maybe here and then their future, you and I can start something that helps that to happen in some way shape to be continued TVC. Why do you think there's been this gap behind my generation?
Then the Danica's and the Simonas and the Anti Beatrices and the me and then you look at like I thought Jamie did a great job last year, but then Jamie said it was too physical for her and went back and did sports cars, which was disappointing honestly because I thought maybe we had somebody coming in. But now there seems to be this big gap and this big hole, and there's nobody winning in the lower formula like we did at the time. Why do you think that that is?
Do you think it's just cyclical or do you think there's a reason for it.
Well, there's more numbers now, at least there are more females racing now than I think there were for the any of the decades before, and they are actually more of them are capable of being good. I don't really know. I have some theories.
First of all, I shouldn't say this, but you can know anyway.
I somehow think that women when they don't succeed and if they have, and one of the biggest words that could get us in trouble is that word expectation. So I think Danica said the bar that everybody felt that they could do what Danica did, you know, and when that didn't happen, whatever level they were racing at, I think they get discouraged sooner and easier because they also they look at the world and say, you know, there's
other things I can do. They see options. The majority of the guys that race they can't do anything else.
Yeah, well I can't do anything else.
They don't have a plan B. But they don't have a plan B.
Yeah.
I think a lot of the gals and if they've done it for seven or eight years, and the other is that they're doing it out of their parents' pocket. I mean they're still doing it out of their parents' pocket. And so if the money doesn't show up from and they expect again that word expectation, because they have accomplished something better than let's say average on their parents or friends' money. They don't understand that that isn't enough to get to that next level.
What do you make of this old female one makes series with that runs with one the academy? What was the W series? What are your thoughts on it? If we ever discussed that.
No, I don't think we are.
I didn't think we have.
I mean when the W series, when it was announced, I was on the fence but also pretty much against it, but was careful, you know, I needed to learn more because it was, let's face that it hadn't been done yet, and they hadn't when they announced it. We didn't see what it was really going to be like, right, And then I got to over to Ostrica and was part
of the original selection process. I watched them go fifty drivers go through that test, the initial test, and realized that it actually was The intentions were really to provide a quality on track experience at the level that we're talking about, which is not really entry level, but it's let's just say it's the lower of the mid level. I mean it's after you get past the entry level of whatever it is you're doing. Now you're on that bottom wrong of the ladder to that next step up.
So I think that having a series that commits to good race cars, good crews working on the race cars, if it is all females, it's it's creating an opportunity for them to race that they probably wouldn't have an equality program. Plus they usually they did at the W Series, and I know they're doing it at F One Academy. Is they are providing the off track training that we're talking about, They have to do media training, they've got fitness, They really bring in all of the elements, so it's
a quality experience. I don't believe we need a bunch of all female racing series because it's one of the best assets about our racing is the fact that it is gender neutral or there is no definition.
Right, is it the only sport that we can compete equally well.
Equestrian is open and sailing is open, So.
Then something near every day talken to you and I pay.
A lot of attention, and I have friends over there in the sailing world, and I have some friends in the equestrian world. And I mean I think that you know, that's what the Iron Dames Devra is now supporting equestrian True, yeah, it's so it's one. We aren't the only, but we're one of the few. But it for you to get enough experience to be at your best. It took me
too damn long. I mean I had to didn't waste but I ended up using up so many valuable years doing this over year and that, I mean the whole decade of the eighties. If I hadn't had Ford, I wouldn't have had the kind of experience that I had. At the same time, it was also limiting me. And if I was because I was bold enough to do a midget race, I was bold enough to still do the twenty four hours and something else, or to go
to do Lamal. Ford didn't. Ford didn't help me go to Lamal and so and going to La Ma going down before them alls on straight helped me. When I got to Indy, I know how all of a sudden I knew what it was like how to go over two twenty or two un three miles an hour. So I mean I was building my toolbox of experience on my own but having a base of having ford. But it took forever. I mean, it takes a long time.
And so I think these gals are benefiting. And I told Courtney Crone that when who I was working with, you know, had been working with for a number of years, I said, I don't turn your nose down at something that will provide you with an opportunity to get good experience. But don't think that's going to blow the doors open and everybody's going to come, no matter how successful you are.
I mean, look at Jamie. She won the b A Series and the F one Academy and yet still had to really work hard to put a deal together to come over to do the Indie Lights. And then it took her two season into the second season and to really shine, you know. And even then it took her a while towards the middle of the latter part of the season to come into her of her own. And my understanding, it wasn't that she didn't feel she was strong enough to do Indy She knew she was going to.
She wasn't strong enough to do Indy Lights and develop the ability to do that, but there was no sponsorship.
I mean, I thought I thought she had the money and wasn't I thought she tested it Bober and thought she strong enough to do that.
Well, no, she she knew that she had to step up a little bit more because Barbara is probably one of the hardest tracks to run as far.
As it went to the hardest, most physical track to do it. I was thinking, I.
Mean she did, and I think the team felt, but there was no sponsorship.
I hope that the next generation are on their way because it would be nice to be able to pass the baton over like you have and then still be involved in some way, shape or form. If you were looking at twenty year old Lynn coming into her first ever car season, assuming you had the money and everything sorted to go and do an entry level season, what would your advice be to yourself back then, knowing what you know now.
Part of our challenges there's just so many different ways to go bat it, so many care all that kind of stuff. Yeah, you know, I think I kind of would you know something that day I could do. I would put my butt in about as many different race cars as I could. In other words, I would go and do a variety of cars depending on what sort of direction you think you want to go. But I mean,
I'm looking at the MX five. You know, there's so many great things that come out of that, the racecraft and how to take care of the car and the drafting and huge fields and keeping the car under you and not you know, I mean, there's so many skills that come out of that. I mean, I look at Connor's Illich's career right now as a model for what somebody should in a way be doing, is not not just attached yourself to one series or to one form
of racing. What I learned how I felt a Talladega in that Thunderbird versus how I felt three weeks later in that indie car in Memphis. I still and I tell a race card artist, you know, you know in here what just feels right like this is what I want. I have wrestled cars, I have, you know, I've wrestled bears feeling like I'm wrestling bears with race cars and did whatever I had to do to make something work. And I'm not just talk about chassis set up or car set up or and also the team. You got
to find your home. You've got to find where your hot butt are hit. And the only way to do that is if you're early on, is to try some different things and then hone in and then find partners, not just money, but find a team, a crew of people, because right now the timing is perfect. Right now, the timing they want to find successful women drivers. And no offense to you, but the younger you are right now, the more talent you bring and also develop your personality
to find out who that. Don't be too timid, don't be too bold, but find out who you are and bring that, bring that with you as an asset and find a home, find a family or a home or a team who goes, damn, we can build this together. I had that with Dick Simon. I mean Dick Simon. I can't tell you the difference that it made to have a team owner who just said, we're going to make this happen.
I had that in Atlantics with Jim and Pan. They were fantastic.
And build on that, you know, find it and then build on it, and you may become the best at something that's less than into your less than cop or less than the very top level. But if we need more women winning, yes, even if it's winning it, I mean like this, Jade who just want to see your copp or whatever the hell that series is called.
But yeah, I can't remember you lady, that lady Abuse that I introduced you to. That I saw a race here that I think has something special. She races in the same championship, So maybe that championship is going to produce some really good race card drivers.
So win and win enough before you get ready to go somewhere else and try to go somewhere else with the people that got you where you were.
Yeah that makes good sense. Well, then, thank you very much for your insight, your stories, and your wisdom. I could talk to you for another episode, and we may well have to do that and get you back on because I have so many more questions. I love you heaps and I will see you very soon, And thank you. Thank you again, thanks for listening to Throttle Therapy. We'll be back next week with more updates and more overtakes.
We want to hear from you. Leave us a review in Apple Podcasts and tell us what you want to talk about. It might just be the topic for our next show. Throttle Therapy is hosted by Katherine legg. Our executive producer is Jesse Katz and Our supervising producer is Grace Fuse. Listen to Throttle Therapy on America's number one podcast network, iHeart, open your free iHeart app and search throttle Therapy with Katherine Legg and start listening