Liv Eklund

Liv Eklund is a race car driver from Malmö, Sweden. She made her debut in stock cars in the TM Lights series in 2018. Despite not winning a race, her rate of improvement caught the attention of Lynxe Racing and she was promoted after team leader Divina Henton was ruled out for the season after a highway crash.

Background
Eklund entered the Lynxe Driver Development program in 2016, with her initial focus on touring cars and GTs. In 2017, Eklund competed in the eGT class of the North American GT series, a class reserved for electric vehicles, carrying Lynxe sponsorship in a Gessler BW25. In weekends where the eGT class did not appear, Eklund's team competed in the NA1 class with a Volpi SR570. Eklund and co-driver Lia Serroni scored 5 wins out of 8 meetings for the eGT class, being the only repeat winners in their class all season. Lynxe offered both Eklund a TM Lights test after the NAGT/TM Lights race at Provo Motorsports Park, driving one of Ingrid Haddeland's backup cars. Eklund impressed enough to earn another test with Lynxe's TM Lights team during the offseason.

In January, Lynxe Racing named Eklund as their 4th driver for their 2018 TM Lights effort, taking over Ingrid Haddeland's ride, as Haddeland moved up to the TM Master Cup level. Eklund's car carried #14, her jersey number when she briefly played youth hockey in Sweden. Her best finishes in 2018 were only a pair of 11th place efforts, making her the only one of Lynxe's regular TM Lights drivers to fail to score a top 5 result. However, Clair Auxier noted Eklund's rate of improvement, particularly in the latter half of the season, and her willingness to learn.

2019
After Divina Henton was injured in an off-track automobile accident, Eklund was controversially given Henton's seat on a temporary basis. Veteran drivers such as Leonid Roderick warned that Eklund would be out of her depth and that her substitution role could permanently damage her career. Others argued that some of Lynxe's other development drivers, such as Alicia Reyes and A.J. Martin were more suited to the drive, since both had more experience than Eklund.

Eklund's limited testing and lack of pace seemed to validate all of those concerns, as she had a poor showing in practice and qualifying for her debut in San Antonio. During the race, Eklund stormed her way through the field with a series of aggressive moves early, before the engine gave out 38 laps in. Some onlookers speculated that Eklund and Lynxe Racing knew that the engine was not going to last after warmups, and that Eklund was instructed to run qualifying laps until it inevitably failed, but Eklund denied it.

In her second race at the Maxwell Center, Eklund qualified 27th, well ahead of where her practice pace suggested she would wind up on the grid. When the race began, Eklund worked her way into the points and dueled with teammate Ingrid Haddeland for several laps. Both Lynxe drivers wore each other and their tires down, and both were so focused on beating each other that they ended up impacting the battle for the lead.

Eklund and Haddeland were both eventually lapped, but, refusing to let the other win, raced each other aggressively, which ultimately cost Ryan Matthews a shot at winning the race. Eklund dismissed Matthews's concerns, saying; "if he's faster than me, than he should pass me", and repeatedly quoted the TM Master Cup series rulebook about blue flags in the media center.

Personal
Eklund has cited Alexis Rainsford as her idol in motorsport, and claims to own every single team hat Rainsford has ever used, as other forms of memorabilia were out of her means. The two met in 2018 over lunch, a meeting Eklund described as; "reassuringly casual".