Sarah Kavanagh

mikemac

Reading a thread over in Motor forum about a teenage girl looking to get into motorsport, fair play

Which got me thinking of other drivers and the only one I know was Sarah Kavanagh

Whatever happened to her?
She was very hyped at one stage, I seem to remember a late late show appearance. Got lots of publicity

So I was under the impression she was very talented

I'm not lazy, I have googled
But I didn't find out a lot. Though I saw she was offered a test drive with Jaguar Formula One which is a great achievement.

Where is her career these days? Is she on the Irish scene?

aidan_dunne

I remember that appearance she made on 'The Late Late Show', would have been around 1995 or so. She had her Formula Opel in the studio (one of her sponsors at the time was RTE Sport, so that probably helped to get her on the show too, I reckon) and spent a few minutes explaining to Gay how the car was basically "a lot like a mini F1 car".

She raced in F-Opel for a couple of years, went to the UK and did some racing there too and I think she went to Japan at one point to try her hand out at Formula Nippon in the hope it might be some sort of stepping stone towards an F1 drive. I don't know how successful she was or if she even managed to get a drive over there, though.

She raced in the EuroBOSS series for a few years, in an ex-Formula 3000/Formula Nippon Reynard, initially, then got her hands on a 1993 Jordan F1 car (ex-Irvine, I think it was). I saw her in that car at the EuroBOSS race at Mondello in 2001 where she finished on the podium. Didn't hear much about her after that year, though, and she seemed to just fade into obscurity having probably given up on her dream of ever reaching F1.

She was also one of the presenters on 'Drive', the RTE motoring show (think of the old version of 'Top Gear' but on a much smaller budget! ) that was around for a couple of years at the end of the 1990s. She was usually the one doing reviews of whatever sporty/fast/flash/expensive cars they could manage to get a loan of off someone for an hour or two!

Robbo

I do remember her wanting to be taken seriously on her racing...and then operating a lingerie affiliate scheme from her website.

If other Irish drivers from that era had her marketability and skill for promotion, we could well have had someone reach F1 or make a decent fist of getting there.

StephenHendry

remember her being on the late late. saw her a couple of times racing, she certainly had the talent, whether she was good enough for f1 im not sure

StephenHendry

came across this article about sarah on the net a few minutes ago

http://speedqueens.blogspot.com/2010/07/sarah-kavanagh.html

SouperComputer

Ficus wrote: »

Your joking right?

losthorizon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_female_Formula_One_drivers