`You can imagine when I first told them," says Sarah Kavanagh, recalling with horror the time she broke the news to her parents that she intended driving cars at 200mph for a living . . . and planned on becoming the first woman to win the Formula One drivers' championship.
"My mother always thought I was a bit flighty anyway because I couldn't find anything I wanted to do. She wasn't particularly happy when I decided to do an art course, but then when I rang her to tell her I'd dropped out of the course to become a motor racing driver, ooh, I could just see her eyes hitting the ceiling."
One parent down, one to go. "Then my Dad flew over from New York and I went to see him with my sister and I can remember thinking `ah no, I don't have to give him this piece of information . . . ' but my sister was sitting there saying, `go on Sarah, tell him'. He just couldn't believe it. He was horrified. So both my parents just said, if you want to do it, then off you go, but you're on your own."
She was very much on her own when she decided, in 1991, that she wanted to become a motor racing driver - and her parents were far from being the only people who thought she was a little crazy. For them, and everyone else who knew her, the "announcement" came out of the blue. Before then, apart from one visit to Donnington with her father when she was eight, she had had no involvement in or connection with motor racing.
Born in England of English and Irish parents, she moved to Jamaica when she was 18 months old but moved to Dublin with her mother and sister three years later after her parents divorced. When she finished school, she enrolled in an art course in a college in Brighton, and then came what proved to be a fateful trip to the Le Mans 24-hour race in 1991 with a group of friends.
"It was a fabulous weekend, one of the most incredible experiences I ever had. Four o'clock in the morning, standing in the Mulsanne straight, listening to these cars, just the sound of them coming out of the darkness and they're going past you at 220 miles an hour, brakes all lit up and glowing. It was just marvellous." When she returned to England she couldn't get the Le Mans "experience" out of her mind. "I just thought I really want to have a go at this, I want to become a Formula One driver, but I dismissed it because I thought `I'm a girl, how stupid can you get?' " But, having dropped out of college, she decided to act on impulse. She was told that karting was rung number one on the very long ladder to Formula One, so she bought a 100cc kart and began racing in the Southern English Championships. And she's been racing ever since.
Once she'd mastered karts, she was ready for the next rung on the ladder, Formula Ford, so, she went out and bought Eddie Irvine's 1987 car, which was all she could afford at the time. "Ideally I would have done British, European then World Kart Championships, then come back and done British Formula Ford with a works team, then British Formula Three, F3000 in Japan and finally Formula One - that's the "correct" way to do it, but that would cost about £3 million. I never really had the budget to do full seasons in anything, so my strategy so far has been to get there any way I can and as quickly as I can."
After Formula Ford came the Formula Opel Championships in Ireland (1993-94), Formula Vauxhall back in England in 1995 and, the following year, the British Formula Two Championship when she drove a 500 horsepower Reynard Cosworth at speeds of up to 200mph. At every stage, she was driving "budget" cars that were rarely competitive, and she could never afford to race full seasons, but her performances against drivers in similar quality cars were impressive enough to secure enough sponsorship to allow her move up to the next level.
In 1994, she got the one seal of approval she had been waiting for. "Up until then, when I'd phone my Mum there'd be no mention of racing, we couldn't talk about it without a screaming match so we'd say okay, let's just leave that subject of what I'm doing.
"Then I was home in Dublin to race in the Formula Opel Championship. On the Thursday before my last race, I was sitting with Mum watching television and she says, out of the blue, `have you got tyres for this race?'. I say `no, I can't afford new tyres' and she says `What? You've got to have new tyres' . . . so she bought me a new set.
"So she finally came to see me race for the first time at Mondello. She walked in and saw the car and she just said `oh my God, I need a gin and tonic'. By the end of the day, she was hanging over the fence shouting at me, `Why didn't you just overtake him?' and I'm saying `it's not that simple Mum'."
When Kavanagh travelled to Japan for the first time in April, for her debut in the Formula Nippon Championship, her mother, Jenny Killen, accompanied her. When she walked through the arrivals' gate in Tokyo, she was met by a television crew and a scrum of reporters and photographers. Sarah Kavanagh is VERY big in Japan. Formula Nippon is the primary `feeder' formula for F1. Kavanagh knows if she is to fulfil her dream of making it to F1, she has to make it first in Formula Nippon. Eddie Irvine, who has been "really helpful all along", put her in contact with his old Cerumo team - they were interested, not least because of the huge interest the Japanese media took in `the woman driver', but could not provide her with a car - she ended up having to ship a 1995 car with a Cosworth engine out to Japan. But she showed enough promise in the race - finishing 14th out of 26 starters - to get the organisers on her side. Conscious of the huge media interest in her, they agreed to pay most of her expenses to enable her to return for the next race in the Championship, but her brakes failed, after five laps, and she was out. She hopes to return to Japan next month to race in Fuji, the final fixture in the 1997 calendar and, if she can secure the funding from sponsors, race two full Formula Nippon seasons.
"I need to do a full season to prove myself once and for all - that's what I'm looking at in Formula Nippon, another two years, possibly a third, and then a Formula One test contract in 1999."
Mike Magan, an old friend of Kavanagh who now works on her PR and securing her sponsorship, says they have got an "extremely positive" response from Bernie Ecclestone, the Formula One supremo, and most of the heads of the F1 teams who, he says, now see the commercial benefits of having a woman driving in Formula One.
Much to their bemusement, the only major F1 figure who has yet to reply to their correspondence is Eddie Jordan. "Ron Dennis, Patrick Head, David Brabham, McLaren, Sauber, Prost - they've all responded, have been very encouraging and helpful, but Jordan has shown no interest whatsoever. "We've even got letters from Ecclestone himself, the man who IS Formula One, where he has said, to quote him, `I'd like to see Sarah in Formula One'. And the thing is, Bernie IS God in this world. Half way through next year, he'll say to whatever F1 team Sarah is working with, `well, can she drive?' and if Sarah's driving well at that point and is showing potential, Bernie will take out his cheque book and she'll be in, that'll be it."
But, despite the encouragement from the leading names in Formula One, the struggle for sponsorship goes on. This weekend Kavanagh, who is based near Silverstone, just outside Birmingham, hoped to race in Fuji, but didn't have the funding required for the trip. She's painfully aware that she will get nowhere unless she can compete at this level.
"When I started racing seven years ago, I decided that I was going to race in Formula One, so everything has been working towards that since then. I can't say that there have been very many good times, it's been really, really difficult and really I shouldn't be doing this. I think you have to come from a wealthy family, maybe with a history of motor racing - all that stuff helps. So it has been an uphill struggle."
She admits that she's met more than a few people in her time who feel her gender makes her unsuited to being a motor racing driver. "There's quite a lot of support for women out racing and a lot of guys will say it's great . . . but nobody really believes a woman can do it. "Maybe that's fair enough because there hasn't been a really successful woman up there doing it, winning races - a successful woman, in a lot of peoples' minds, is just being there, but for me that's not enough. I don't just want to be there . . I want to win races, I want to win championships."
But what about the dilemma she faces in just wanting to be viewed as a good driver, yet having to promote herself as a `woman driver' to get the sponsorship she needs? "That's true, there is a dilemma in that for me, but I often wonder if I was just a guy, with the same determination as I have, would it have been easier? Unfortunately, I'm having to push the `woman thing', which I hate doing, but probably, if I wasn't a woman, I wouldn't be this far behind. You just don't know."
She remembers, with particular fondness, one incident in Japan last April when it felt like she had already changed the world of motor racing. "Every single team in Japan has a campaign girl - they're basically dolly birds wearing g-strings and high-heel shoes. I said to the press officer for my team `I don't want a campaign girl, I want a campaign boy'. Next thing, this guy arrives on the grid wearing the sponsor's jacket, carrying an umbrella and he says `I am your campaign boy'. I said `you're kidding' and he says `no, I AM your campaign boy'. So I said `cool'!"
* Sarah Kavanagh's Internet site is at http://www.sarah.org/sarah/welcome.htm
