Leilani Münter: Former racing driver wins BBC's Evergreen Athlete Award

Former racing driver Leilani Münter has won the BBC's Evergreen Athlete Award, which is part of its inaugural Green Sport Awards.

The announcement comes before the main awards programme to be aired in October, celebrating individuals and organisations from across the globe who are actively contributing to a more sustainable future through their sporting profile and practises.

A panel of judges recognised Münter, 48, as one of the first athletes to use her platform to such prominent effect in raising awareness of environmental issues, as well as a continued and escalating effort over many years - often to the detriment of her career.

Unafraid and unapologetic, she brought the environmental conversation to petrolheads, while also challenging convention as a woman in a male-dominated sport.

Münter was doing this long before it became a cause celebre elsewhere in motorsport, and significantly prior to the development of electric racing.

Who is Leilani Münter?

Münter was brought up in Minnesota, first developing a love of animals then a passion for the ocean when she learned to scuba dive before studying biology at university.

But there was something she was in a hurry to achieve - she wanted to be a racing driver.

As ever, she took an unusual route - earning the money she needed by working as a photo and stunt double for actress Catherine Zeta-Jones.

"A film called Traffic came to San Diego and they were looking for somebody that looked like Catherine," she says. "I looked like her, but I wasn't tall enough so had to wear big platform shoes."

It was enough to help her reach her goal, and one day at racing school was enough.

"I was the only female driver, and I was the quickest," she says. "One of the instructors said: 'You should pursue this.' That short conversation changed my life."

A turning point

Münter was first sponsored to race in 2001, but it was watching An Inconvenient Truth in 2006 that really prompted a change in direction in her career.

"That film was what spurred the change from a race-car driver who privately cared about these issues, to a race-car driver that was going to put it on the hood of my car and bring it to a demographic that maybe weren't thinking about them."

From that point, Münter's environmentalism encompassed all aspects of her career.

Most notably, she stopped accepting sponsorship from companies that made meat or dairy products, tested on animals, produced fossil fuels, or were "irresponsible with regards to their environmental impact".

"I wouldn't have been able to look at myself in the mirror if I had put an oil company on my racing suit," she says.

"Part of what let me throw caution to the wind was I felt like such an odd one out being a woman in a man's sport. My tag line was 'Never underestimate a vegan hippie chick with a race car'.

"I switched from trying to fit in to realising I was never going to fit in and embracing it."

Münter is pictured in front of her "200mph billboard"

Münter began using her car to draw attention to causes she cared about.

"I like to call it my 200mph billboard," she says. "Instead of asking people to buy something, I was asking them to think about issues. That gave racing a much deeper value for me."

She was also helping to change the way teams operated - in 2014, hers became the first to run their pit box on solar power.

And three years earlier she had made a significant change in her life - becoming vegan.

"I tried to lead by example, and share with fans what I was doing," she says.

Münter adopted an area of protected rainforest totalling 1,500 acres - about 25 acres for each of her 61 races - and with her team handed out more than 30,000 vegan cheeseburgers at tracks.

Activism became her main focus, and she is "certain" she could have gone further in racing had she taken sponsorship from anyone.

"My racing served a bigger purpose," she says.

After an explosion at BP's Deepwater Horizon oil rig - on Earth Day 2010 - Münter was invited to the scene.

"I'll never forget when we first spotted the oil," she says. "It was from horizon to horizon. And there were animals covered in oil. That was such a devastating scene. One of the people on my boat just fell to the ground and started crying.

"I was like, 'I'm never gonna give another dime to the oil industry.'"

Full-time environmentalist

Having retired from motor racing three years ago, Münter says her "relationship with the combustion engine is over".

She is active in lobbying politicians including US President Joe Biden, and on the frontline of protests with Hollywood stars such as Mark Ruffalo and Leonardo di Caprio.

Münter met Joe Biden in the White House

Münter is continuing her activism from "behind a camera rather than behind a wheel".

In a documentary called Racing Extinction, she drove an electric vehicle fitted with a special camera to show emissions from other vehicles, as well as a projector to superimpose images of endangered wildlife on to buildings.

"I think it stopped people in their tracks and made them think," she says. "I hope it stayed with them and they change the way they live in order to not have such a big impact on our planet."

The film profiles Toughie - the last living Rabbs' fringe-limbed tree frog.

"He was just a small brown frog but I knew he was the last one, so meeting him was like meeting a unicorn," says Münter. "He has since died, and his species is extinct.

"But there are so many creatures that are just like him that are not magnificent. They're not cuddly... but they are just as important to our ecosystem.

"I think biodiversity is one of the environmental issues people are not paying enough attention to. We have torn that down. We focus so much on the effect on humans, but by taking out the balance of nature it will eventually take us out as well."

What is her message?

"If we go down, we go down fighting, because we can't give up. We've lost so many species, so much of the rainforest has been cut down, and so many of the coral reefs bleached. But there are still coral reefs alive, and there are still pockets of the rainforest thriving with animals. We have to remember to keep fighting for those things and not give up."