Liz Lehmann knows the fast way around.
When she was 6 years old, her dad took her out to Baer Field Speedway and stuck her in a go-kart, and she hasn’t climbed out since.
“One thing I always tell people is I’ll always have a kart so I can get out and drive,” says Lehmann, who’ll graduate in a few weeks with a degree from Purdue’s Krannert School of Management. “It’s one of the most therapeutic things for me to get in a kart and turn left. It’s definitely something that once it’s in your blood, it’s not leaving.”
Of course, getting it into your blood is another matter entirely.
That first time at Baer Field, for instance?
Lehmann won’t con you. She was scared to death.
“Totally chickened out,” she says, laughing.
“Yeah, after I saw my brother do it, I knew I had to,” says Lehmann, whose father grew up racing karts in Ohio. “So later in the afternoon I got in, and after that they couldn’t get me out of the kart.”
A love affair with racing quickly ensued and continues unabated to this day. The business degree, for instance, she hopes to parlay into a job in motorsports; she’s already served internships in media relations with Target Chip Ganassi Racing, most recently with driver Memo Rojas in the Grand-Am Rolex Sports Car Series.
Like a lot of others, and with obviously more interest than most, she watched Danica Patrick make history in Japan last week, becoming the first woman to win a major open-wheel race. And when Patrick burst into tears in victory lane, Lehmann was both startled (“You don’t really see a whole lot of emotion from her”) and empathetic.
After all, didn’t she feel much the same when she won the Grand Prix?
“I couldn’t believe I was going to win,” she says now. “It truly was the perfect day.”
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