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location: rochester life > featured stories
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Drive Time
By Steve Lange
Former Rochesterite Leilani Münter has parlayed an up-and-coming acting/modeling career (she was Catherine Zeta-Jones’ photo double in Traffic and worked as a stunt double on Scorpion King) into an up-and-coming career in car racing.
Leilani Münter is driving a 700-horsepower stock car that could — could — go 170 mph on a mile-and-a-half race track that could — could — handle speeds well over 200. Leilani, though, is creeping (relatively speaking) at about 80 down what should be the fourth-gear-and-fast frontstretch of the Kentucky Speedway’s asphalt tri-oval. She’s looking in her rearview mirror and waiting for her ‘student’ — one of the eight men in the Fast Track racing class who’ve paid $350 each for the chance to drive 10 laps in a real race car on a real race track — to catch up. She’s speeding up then slowing down, motioning for him to come on, asking over the radio if there’s something wrong with the guy’s car. But he doesn’t speed up, doesn’t wave back, doesn’t pull down pit road. Just keeps driving — for a painfully slow nine more laps — a state-of-the-art stock car at 3,000 rpm around one of the nation’s fastest superspeedways. He’ll most likely drive faster in his Dodge Caravan on the highway home. You can hear, when the cars drive by, that the motors aren’t meant for these slow speeds. It’s 90 degrees in the midday Kentucky heat, maybe 20 degrees hotter inside the car, under the helmet and flame-retardant race suit. You know that Leilani, without the air moving through the car, is hot in there. And so it goes. Just when Leilani Münter is ready to drive fast — to really take off — it seems like something is holding her back. … Leilani, during a break from driving, sits in a small trailer-turned-concession stand selling Fast Track t-shirts (“Drive it like you stole it”) and Powerade to waiting racer wannabes and their family and friends who have tagged along to watch from the pits. She brings up the “woman in a man’s driving world” thing before I even ask, and I hadn’t planned on asking. “Do I know I have a long way to go to catch up with the men? Yes,” she asks then answers. “But so far all of the guys have been great to me. As long as you can prove it out on the track they will respect you.” It comes across as more pre-emptive than defensive, and you can’t blame her. She’s been conditioned by the constant questions about sex appeal and women drivers and articles describing her “go-go boots and hip huggers.” Transcripts from some of her previous interviews read like the Iran-Contra hearings if the congressional committee had been grilling Oliver North about his high heels and undergarments. It’s a fine line for Leilani, whose racing press has come, often, in the form of men’s magazines touting her “size 2 body” or “long black locks.” Esquire named her as one of their “Women We Love” in their April 2002 issue. Men’s Journal dubbed her “America’s Sexiest Race Car Driver” in October ‘03. Her FHM magazine photo shoot (a five-pager in their September ‘03 issue) resulted in the title of “The Hottest Woman in NASCAR.” She turned down Playboy, she says, even though it “would have been enough to get me on the track full time for the first time in my entire racing career and pay off the debt I’ve racked up during my college years and those desperate days at the track when I charged racing tires on my credit card.” “I turned it down,” she says, “because I want to make it in racing based on my driving abilities and my ability to give a sponsor media exposure to help them sell more of their product. I also want to be able to hold my head up high when I walk through that garage.” She has parlayed an up-and-coming modeling/acting career into a shot at stock cars. And she has parlayed her up-and-coming stock car success into more modeling and media work. Pre-racing days, Leilani dabbled in print modeling (in 1990, she was a regional semifinalist in the Teen Magazine Great Model Search), then pursued it again in college at the University of California-San Diego. “I was a total hippie in college,” she says. “I wore Birkenstocks. I owned no makeup. My friends had a pseudo-intervention for me. They took me shopping. Bought me makeup. Talked me into signing up with a modeling agency.” It wasn’t long before Leilani was posing for local salon ads and book covers. “It was just another way to make beer money in college,” she says. “I was doing waitress work, telemarketing, all of the standard college jobs. The model work just kind of fell into my lap. It wasn’t like I was a model.” About the same time, in 1998, Leilani went with friends to watch an SCCA (Sports Car Club of America) event, in which amateurs drive their own cars on makeshift courses. “I watched for a little while, and then I said ‘I can do this. I’m going to race.’ I’d done
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