Martyna during the Dakar
Prior to the rise of Robert Kubica, there were not many well-known Polish racing drivers. Martyna was one of the better-known ones.
She was born in September 1974 and became a famous TV personality in Poland at a young age. She has been likened to a raunchier version of Jeremy Clarkson - she is one of Poland's most notorious motoring journalists and has posed for Playboy - not the only speedqueen to have done so, it should be known!
Her TV work gave her access to a number of fast vehicles, and her first competitive endeavours were on motorcycles. She had her first taste of four-wheeled competition in 2002. Not one to do things by halves, she competed on the Paris-Dakar rally in a Toyota Landcruiser with navigator Jaroslaw Kazberuk. They finished 44th. This was not bad for a first-timer as many debutantes never reach the half-way stage.
In the same year, Martyna's sponsors allowed her to drive an Opel Corsa Super 1600 car on selected Polish Rally Championship rounds as part of their young driver development programme.
In 2003, she returned to rally-raids and entered the Trans-Siberian raid across Russia. The route was 14000km long and took nearly a month. She and team-mate Andrzej Derengowski shared driving duties, with Martyna on the fast stuff and Andrzej on the rough stuff. The combination was a good one; after winning a number of stages they finished the arduous rally in second place.
Martyna has also driven some of the smaller desert events in her Landcruiser, although little has been written in English about her results. At the moment she is more famous in her homeland as the presenter of Polish Big Brother. More recently, her exploits have included climbing Mount Everest and other mountains, chronicled by Polish TV.
(Image from aerograf.com.pl)
No comments:
Post a Comment