From horses to horsepower! SARAH CATTANEO
Words: Ian Rae, Photos: Melissa K. Smith and Ian Rae. Sarah Cattaneo grew up with a love of horsepower, it was something she got from both her father and her mother. The only thing was she started competing on the fourlegged version. Let’s rewind to Sarah’s early years in Phoenix, AZ. “My Dad raced in SCCA when I was a baby, so being around the racetrack was natural for me! I can’t even remember what type of car he raced as I was only two or three and he stopped racing shortly after my younger sister was born. The love of racing was something that stayed with me. My mom however, loved and rode horses. When I was about three or four years old, my parents took my to a petting zoo where they had pony rides. I cried every time they tried to take me off the pony, and that was the start of my love affair with horses! So, when I was old enough my mom signed me up for riding lessons which happened around the age of five.” By the time she was eight, Sarah’s competitive juices were coming to the fore and she started competitively show jumping and was Nationally ranked by age eleven. Sarah went on, “That is when it got really serious. When I was fourteen I moved over to California to train with a United States Equestrian Team rider and the following year I qualified for the U.S. Junior Olympic team. Unfortunately I never got the chance to go to the Olympics as my horse got hurt prior to the event. I did get to go to Rome, Italy to compete once so that was sort of neat.” By the time her equestrian career was over Sarah was a five time U.S. Equestrian Federation medal winner and had won over one hundred championships. Now it was time to move up from one horsepower!
“I had always been into cars and would go to car shows with my dad whenever I wasn’t riding horses. In 2006 I was driving a BMW 330i on the road and decided the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving looked like fun. I took the four-day class, where I got to drive a C5 Corvette and after that the rest is history, I was hooked. My instructor at Bondurant, Danny Bullock would go on to
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