Nolan Lamkin: Indiana’s Rising Young Road Racer

If you’re a dirt bike rider finding a place to practice isn’t all that tough. The nearest field will do. But if you’re a road racer you have to be a little more creative. Nolan Lamkin and his dad Bill thought they found a perfect spot – a nice big piece of clean pavement behind a Kohl’s department store.

Things were going along just fine. Lamkin was doing laps, getting his knee down on the improvised racetrack and getting in some good, solid practice on his Kawasaki KX65 motard setup. That’s when the cop drove around the corner. Nolan did what any self-respecting road racer would do when faced with that situation – he rode off and hid!

“I took cover behind a big dumpster,” Nolan laughs. “After a while I started shouting out to my dad, ‘Is he gone yet?’ It turns out all he wanted was a place to smoke.”

The police officer actually took interest in what Nolan was doing and watched him burn a few hot laps. Making laps around a loading area parking lot and dodging local constables, just another day in the life of a young, up-and-coming road racer.

Nolan Lamkin is just 12 years old, but already many in the Indiana racing community are pegging their hopes on this young road racing prodigy.

You have to understand the conundrum facing Hoosier road racing enthusiasts. To say they have a bit of an inferiority complex would be an understatement. While neighboring Ohio, Illinois and Michigan have all produced top road racers, Indiana is going through a massively long drought between having top-notch pavement scratchers.

The one and only racer from Indiana to do anything significant on the national road racing scene was Terry Hampton, who was a top-10 AMA Superbike racer from the mid-1980s. If you’re counting that’s almost 30 years ago. Long a hotbed of producing auto racing stars (Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart just to name a few), fans of motorcycle road racing have long hoped a young Hoosier racers would emerge. Even the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which hosts a round of the MotoGP World Championship, would love nothing more than having a local racer to promote come Red Bull Indianapolis GP time.

Suddenly Hoosier fans have a rider to root for in Lamkin. Even though it will be a few more years until the middle schooler is eligible to race professionally, Indiana enthusiasts are patient. We’ve waited nearly 30 years, what’s another three or four?

Lamkin just scored a potential huge break in his young racing career that could put him squarely on the path to his goal of becoming a Grand Prix racer. Lamkin just learned he was given an invite to come to Spain for the Red Bull Rookies Cup tryout. He leaves Monday.

Clearly it’s a golden opportunity for Lamkin and fortunately, as most 12-year-olds, he seems rather oblivious to the pressure and probably doesn’t fully grasp the hopes that Indiana racing fans place on the young rider from Carmel, Indiana.

When asked how he feels about getting the invite to Red Bull Rookies, he just smiles and says, “It’s going to be a lot of fun!”

Nolan has been road racing for three years now, something that seems nearly mathematically impossible for a 12 year old, but as he explains his entrée into the sport was on minibikes raced on go-kart tracks.

“The first track I raced on was in Ohio,” Lamkin explains. “It had huge potholes all around and if you hit one you’d wipe out. There was one corner that had a pothole and you had an apex that was maybe six inches wide.”

So given the background of some of the tracks he’s raced, Lamkin will think he’s landed in road racing heaven when he gets to the track in Spain.

Lamkin, who plays tennis and rides bicycles as hobbies, already has a long view on his coming racing career. You can tell when you ask him about what he feels is his biggest accomplishment in racing so far. Instead of pointing to a win or a series championship, Lamkin points to a recent race at Putnam Park, which actually ended in a crash, as his biggest breakthrough. It was his first race on a wet track.

“I started out mid-pack and I got past by about 10 riders at the start,” Lamkin said. “I past a few of them going into turn one. The leader was five seconds ahead of me by the second lap and I ended up passing him. Then he passed me back and I ended up wiping out, but I definitely learned my boundaries and learned a lot about riding in the rain.”

Lamkin has a busy couple of weeks in front of him. Not only does he have the Red Bull Rookies tryout in Spain, as soon as he gets back he’ll be heading down to Barber Motorsports Park and the WERA Grand National Finals for his first appearance in that prestigious road racing event.

Lamkin is not your cookie cutter road racer either. In addition to having many interests outside of racing, he’s so into the sport as a fan, he has a little more detailed view than you might expect. When asked who his racing hero is, instead of Nicky Hayden, Jorge Lorenzo or Marc Marquez as you might expect, Lamkin without hesitation says – Danny Kent.

Kent, a current Moto2 rider from England is an esoteric choice to say the least, but Lamkin is firm in his belief that Kent is one of the best racing talents out there. “I first saw him on the Young Guns Rising Show and followed him when he went from Rookies Cup to Moto3 to Moto2.”

Riding in Spain will be his first opportunity to race outside America, but he’s been a world traveler since the age of two. “I’ve been to a lot of places in Europe,” Lamkin said. “My grandparents were from Germany, so about three-quarters of my relatives are German.”

Lamkin takes German language classes in school so he’ll better able to talk with his relatives overseas as he gets older.

At 12, Lamkin just barely made the age deadline for Red Bull Rookies. He’ll be one of, if not the youngest rider at the tryout. Nevertheless he’s confident he’ll put in a good showing and even if he’s ultimately not selected this year he thinks the experience will be a big positive for his racing career.

Lamkin’s biggest dream is racing MotoGP at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. “I would be in front of all my friends and family and racing in my home city,” Lamkin said. “That would be amazing.”

Take your time and have fun Nolan. Hoosier fans will be waiting. — Larry Lawrence