Leilani Munter happens to be an electric-car-owning, rainwater-collecting, backyard-composting vegan who also used to be a stunt double for Catherine Zeta-Jones and who currently makes her living as a professional race-car driver. As a woman who has found success in a highly competitive, male-dominated sport, she’s in a relatively small category to begin with. But as an outspoken environmentalist who leverages her racing-world celebrity to promote wildlife conservation, habitat protection, and—yes—even fossil fuel reduction, she’s in a category of one. Munter, 40, originally planned to become a scientist; she majored in biology at the University of California, San Diego. But after college she decided to take some of the money she had made as Zeta-Jones’s stunt double and enroll in racing school “just as a bucket-list sort of thing,” she says. She blew the other students right off the track. A racing-team owner noticed, and soon Munter was competing in real races—and frequently finishing near the top. Since 2001, she has worked her way up her sport’s professional ladder to the super speedways, where she has raced both in stock cars and in open-wheel, Indy-style cars. (At the moment, she competes mainly on the ARCA stock-car circuit.) Along the way, she has forged an identity for herself as racing’s greenest speed demon. In 2007, the same year she became only the fourth woman ever to race in the elite Indy Pro series, Munter announced that she would be adopting one acre of rainforest for every race in which she participated, in hopes of becoming professional racing’s first “carbon neutral” driver.
Posted on: Wed, 11 Jun 2014 16:02:41 +0000
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