A speedy lady from Swabia: Katja Poensgen celebrates a milestone birthday

Katja Poensgen was born on 23 September 1976 in Mindelheim in the Unterallgäu region. Consequently, she is celebrating a milestone birthday today, Wednesday, with a zero at the end.

Thanks to her father, Bert Poensgen – the former long-serving head of sales and racing at Suzuki Germany – she caught the motorsport bug at an early age. She also came to live in Heppenheim when she was young, as that was where Suzuki’s German motorcycle branch was based for many years.

Like so many other male and female racers of the 1990s, she entered the world of racing via the ADAC Junior Cup, which was introduced in 1993. In 1995, she enjoyed her first major successes. Her first podium finishes were followed that same year by her first race win, and by the end of the season Katja Poensgen was crowned overall champion. In the three-way title battle, Reinhard Stolz and Steve Jenkner – who would later go on to compete in the 125cc Grand Prix – came off second best.

The World Championship was then Katja Poensgen’s stated goal, but as she had also come into contact with large-capacity motorbikes at an early stage, she did not want to venture into the 125cc class.

In 1998, she won the Supermono European Championship on a BMR Suzuki, and a year later she even triumphed at Daytona, where she was also successful on a single-cylinder machine.

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After a year (2000) in the Superstock 750 European Championship, she finally fulfilled her dream in 2001 and competed in the quarter-litre class of the Motorcycle World Championship. She began the season with Dieter Theis’s Racing Factory team. In the wet race at Mugello, she then produced her finest performance, finishing 14th – ahead of her German colleagues Klaus Nöhles (16th) and Alex Hofmann (18th), amongst others. She thus went down in history as the first and only woman to score World Championship points in the ‘middleweight’ class. Around the middle of the season, she switched to the Australian Shell Advance team for financial reasons and following a serious row with Dieter Theis.

After a season’s break from the World Championship – or rather, an alternative year competing in the Superstock 1000 European Championship – she returned to the World Championship in 2003 with the Arie Molenaar Honda team. Although she did not manage a similarly spectacular run as in 2001, she rarely finished last. Nevertheless, her Grand Prix career came to an end at the close of the season, not least due to renewed budgetary problems.

She continued to ride motorbikes, however, for example in the IDM Superstock series. In 2012, she finished as runner-up in the FIM e-Power International Championship on a Münch TTE-2.

Later, she also had a go at four-wheeled racing in the Porsche Cup, but her heart still belongs to motorbikes and the motorcycling scene. These days, she’s a real force to be reckoned with on social media as @lakatja98.