Catie Munnings: From presenting on CBeebies to racing on Saudi sand dunes

Catie Munnings is having a rare weekend off. She is watching the London E-Prix, enjoying seeing electric powered motors tearing round Docklands. Not just watching, but taking notes, picking up clues for her day job as the only British driver among 20 competitors in Extreme E, the electric version of rally cross.

“I see it differently,” she says of watching motor racing. “My sister works in the film industry doing costumes and she says she can never watch a film in the way she used to, she’s always looking for continuity mistakes. It’s the same for me. Though I’m not sure that’s the best metaphor.”

She shakes her head. “Basically, I’ve got a lot to learn.”

Seeing Munnings in action, however, it is hard to reconcile her performances with her suggestion that she is some sort of ingenue. As its title insists, Extreme E is not for the faint-hearted. Competitors drive their futuristic Odyssey 21 cars over the toughest terrain in the world. They hurtle across sand dunes in the Saudi desert, ice flows in Greenland, Andean mountain routes in Chile, highlighting climate change issues while they do it. “Plus a wood in Dorset,” she adds, grinning. “So not always that extreme.”

Munnings has come up against some of the motorsport’s finest talent – ex-Formula One driver Jenson Button has raced before while Sebastian Loeb, the multiple former world rally champion, is still amongst the drivers. And in Greenland two years ago she beat Loeb to finish first.

“He came up to me afterwards and said, ‘Well done, you deserved that,” she recalls. “I was thinking, ‘How did that happen? I mean how is that even possible?’”

She has a point. She is, after all, just 25. But then, when it comes to accelerating through motorsport, Munnings has always had her foot to the floor.

“I can’t remember the first time I sat behind a wheel, I think I always was,” she says. “Me and my sister grew up on a farm, constantly sitting on our dad’s lap behind a wheel. He had a motorsports entertainment company and there was always something to drive: buggies, old cars, driving around on fields, sliding in the grass.”

Her first experience in a rally car was when her father, Chris, who was the head instructor at Brands Hatch rally school, took her for a burn round the course.

“He’d been a driver himself but never had the budget to do it properly,” she recalls. “The sheer adrenalin I felt sitting in a passenger seat alongside him. I wasn’t scared. The trust you have in your parents, I never felt he’d crash.”

Soon, her father swapped places with her, gave her the chance to drive and quickly became her coach as she began to compete in autograss racing.

“When I first started we’d be driving all over the country,” she says. “I was sat in the back with my books trying to do my homework. My first rally was in Belgium, and I had to come back between testing and qualifying to sit an A Level. Everybody was getting nervous about doing the exam, and there was me thinking this is relaxing, I’m not going to be crashing any cars in the next hour.”

She proved so proficient at driving she decided not to go to study to be a vet. Instead, she went full-time behind the wheel –  a significant challenge for an 18-year-old woman.

“I was very aware it was a male environment,” she says. “There was no linear path into the sport, especially not for women. I would never have thought motorsport was open without my dad saying he’d sat next to hundreds of people at rally schools and I really had something. But then I know everyone’s dad says that to them.”

Her father, though, clearly knew what he was seeing. Alongside the motor racing, she also impressed as a television presenter, hosting a show for Cbeebies called Catie’s Amazing Machines.

“I loved it,” she says of her show. “People seemed to love it too. I still get mums coming up to me saying, ‘My son loves your show’. Kind of like Top Gear for kids, it was so fun. I was flying a helicopter in the morning, diving in a submarine in the afternoon. Bucket-list stuff.”

She ultimately had to give up the television gig: “Pretty much every day I wasn’t racing, I was filming. It got to the point towards the end I was so frazzled, I couldn’t remember the lines for the show, never mind remembering what I had to do on each of 20 stages in a rally. Basically I knew I wasn’t doing either job properly.”

Then everything was put on hold with Covid before a call came in 2021 from one of the teams in a new competition, Extreme E, where each team had to have an equal number of men and women. Although there can be lengthy gaps between races as the vehicles are transported around the world by ship, her Extreme E commitment is still all-consuming.

“It’s not just racing without a trace, but leaving something positive behind,” she says of the competition and its environmental message. “When I started I was worried it would be: turn up, have a photo, disappear. But actually programmes are long lasting, charities working on them while we speak, we get to do really interesting things.”

‘Half the girls wouldn’t be competing if it wasn’t for the championship’

Munnings suggests there is another intriguing benefit of the new competition: the number of women drivers getting the chance to prove themselves.

“100 per cent it’s accelerating women into the sport,” she says. “It’s not like tennis, you can’t just go and hit a few balls for practice. It costs tens of thousands to organise a training day. Half the girls I spoke to said they wouldn’t be competing if it wasn’t for the championship.

“[Loeb] is driving in the Dakar Rally next year and he’s chosen his Extreme E team-mate [Klara Andersson] to be his co-driver. There’s no regulation in that race to have equal men and women. He just believes she is the best he can get. This is real progress.”

However, there is one thing about the competition’s cars she wishes might change. “The noise,” she says of the car she drives. “It’s not silent, there’s a kind of whizz. But I grew up as a rally fan standing in a Welsh forest with the ground shaking and a huge roar. It would be so cool if we could get that back somehow.”

Catie Munnings is a Zenith Friend of the Brand and mentor for the Zenith Dreamhers Programme