By K.S. Wang
Quick Stats: Martina Navratilova Tennis champion
Daily drivers: 2006 Range Rover Sport (Martina's rating for this car: 10 on a scale of 1 to 10)
2007 Jeep Wrangler (Rating: 10)
Other cars: 1986 Toyota Land Cruiser (Rating: 10)
Favorite road trip: Southwestern U.S.
Car she learned to drive in: 1973 Skoda Octavia
First car bought: 1975 Mercedes-Benz 450SL
In the early 1970s, at the same time she embarked on the road to becoming a tennis legend, a young Martina Navratilova also was developing another, but lesser-known passion: cars.
Navratilova cut her behind-the-wheel teeth in a Skoda Octavia in what was then Communist Czechoslovakia. Her father bought the turquoise Octavia in 1973 (the same year she turned pro on the tennis circuit), but Navratilova pretty much knew how to drive by then because as a child she was a keen observer.
"It was a good car, it was a stick of course, we only had stickshifts in Europe," Navratilova says. "I always watched people -- how they drive -- so I knew how to drive before I ever tried because I watched. I couldn't wait to start driving. I rode my father's moped when I was like 10 years old."
Learning how to drive in Europe had its advantages. "It was standard 4, the H," she says of the Skoda. "It was not an easy car to drive, so coming here was a piece of cake, either the automatic or the stick, because those things were pretty sensitive."
First car
Back in 1975, an 18-year-old Navratilova made headlines around the world when she defected to America, right after playing in the U.S. Open. That same year, Navratilova bought her first car, paying $19,000 cash for a brand-new Mercedes Benz 450SL. It did not come with a manual tranny, so she settled on the automatic. "I loved it," she says.
Whenever she won a tennis match and a car was offered as a prize, Navratilova always chose the sports car, not the cash. She thinks she won up to eight different Porsches.
"You could either take the prize money or the car," she says. "Nowadays, they get the prize money and the car. It's different times these days. But I always took the car and sold the old one and had the latest and greatest."
The List
Navratilova is a car connoisseur. "The 928 was okay, the 911 is sweet," she begins saying. "I drove a 959 Porsche in Germany 20 years ago now and I had the thing going 200 miles an hour, so that was fun. I think we drove for two hours and averaged about 150 miles an hour. So that was a blast. This is 20 years ago when there wasn't so much traffic."
That was the Autobahn, right? "Yup," she replies. "You can't do that anymore because there's too many cars. You might have the performance but you don't have the opportunity."
One of the only upscale marques she has not owned is a Lamborghini. "I've had a Ferrari, I've had a bunch of Porches, a couple of Jaguars, of course, Mercedes."
When I ask her which Ferrari she owned, she replies, "I had the worst Ferrari of all time, the 400i. It was a four-seater piece of crap because the turning radius was like a hundred yards," Navratilova says, laughing. "I couldn't get it in and out of my garage because I had to keep going back and forth, back and forth, just so I could fit it in. Pain in the ass. I bought it in Texas and I sold it Texas. That was a bad Ferrari."