Car in Pieces, She Remained Whole

Friday, in Sebring, Fla., Katherine Legge got back on the horse that threw her. She climbed into a racing car.

Legge is the 25-year-old driver from Guilford, England, who was last seen flying through the air in a piece of her car as the rest of it flew around and disintegrated. When they cleaned it up, most of what was left fit into a shoe box.

That was last Sunday, on a normally non-dangerous turn, on a racetrack at Elkhart Lake in Wisconsin called Road America.

Except when the race cars come to town, it is a tranquil place in a rural setting of rolling hills and pretty lakes, where the bass and walleyes are plentiful and the fastest movement in the autumn is the leaves turning red and yellow.

It is also the place where Roger Penske, greatly successful there, had his beginnings as a racing icon, and where A.J. Foyt, already one, mangled his legs in the worst crash of his storied career.

What happened when Legge headed toward Corner 11, in sixth place only five laps from the end of this 51-lap Champ Car race, was the kind of crash you watch in disbelief.

Part of a stabilizing wing on the back of her car broke off while she was on the throttle at 180 mph. When that happens, the downforce that keeps the car on the track is lost and the driver becomes a passenger.

“I figure I lost about 1,000 pounds of downforce,” Legge says. “Before I knew it, I had picked up 6-10 mph, which is like getting another 100 horsepower. I felt like somebody put a rocket up my arse.”

After that, Legge admits, she closed her eyes. Those of us watching the tape later didn’t have that luxury.

The car slammed into the outside wall and climbed the chain-link fence atop it. Wheels came off, dirt flew everywhere, pieces of metal formed their own little tornado.

Legge estimates that the driver’s compartment, a close-fitting tub that held together as it was designed to and saved her life, got as high as 12 feet off the ground. Her front wheels flew twice that high.

“I remember thinking, as I flew through the air, that this wasn’t good,” she says. “People don’t like to see drivers get hurt, and they especially don’t like to see women get hurt. That’s why sponsors are so hesitant about backing women drivers. They don’t want to be connected to something just like what was happening to me.”

She ended up, still strapped in, face down in the dirt, driver’s compartment still intact. She has seen the replays and been able to time the reaction of the safety crew and says that, remarkably, from the moment she lost control until the moment rescue workers were standing over her, only 38 seconds had elapsed.

“They were incredible,” she says. “[Champ Car] has the best safety crews in the world. I’m sorry now that I was kind of rude to the guys at first.”

Rude?

“I yelled at them to get me out of the friggin’ thing.”

Nobody who had seen the accident could have predicted what happened next. Freed from the wreckage, Legge got up, walked to the ambulance, went to the track medical center and made two requests. She asked for a cup of tea and then, while being examined and noticing that a replay of the accident was being played, asked if she could watch.

“All I could think was, ‘Wow!’ ” she says.

Soon, she was released from the medical center, reunited with friends and teammates and her father, Derek, who said he had gone through “the worst 15 minutes of my life,” and wandered back to her trailer area.

Later that night, worried that her skirt wouldn’t properly cover a bruise on her knee, she attended an awards dinner at a nearby resort, ate well, stayed for all the presentations and then went to her hotel room and, in her words, “slept like a baby.”

To have seen this accident and know its aftermath gives new testimonial to the concept of miracles. A driver might live through a wreck like that, but the future is usually filled with healing bones and skin grafts.

Nothing of the sort for Legge.

“All my bits are intact,” she told reporters shortly after the wreck, and repeated it on many of the network TV appearances she made the next few days.

That changed only slightly as the week went on. Now, she says, “I am starting to find bruises in places you can’t even imagine.”

Her trip to Sebring was designed to get her fitted in a new car, previously her backup car, and to shake it down on the track before it gets shipped off to Australia for her next race Oct. 22. She sees this as business as usual.

“This is the worst wreck I’ve ever been in, but I’ve had others, where the cars have rolled,” she says, adding that she wasn’t injured in those, either.

“I guess I’m like one of those cats, with nine lives.”

It’s eight now, Katherine.

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Bill Dwyre can be reached at bill.dwyre@latimes.com. To read previous columns by Dwyre, go to latimes.com/dwyre.