MATT EDWARDS BRITISH RALLYING’S RECORD BREAKER
Matt Edwards has overtaken some of the biggest names in rallying, not only from these islands but also from around the world, to become the first three-in-a-row winner of the British Rally Championship.
The fact that he has done so his own way, relying on his own resourcefulness as well as his pace, has endeared him to the sport’s fans like few drivers of his generation.
Bizarrely, the BRC now finds itself without its most successful star as we prepare for the 2022 season, with Edwards currently sidelined by a lack of budget – something that fans want to see fixed as much as the man himself as he answers their questions.
Question: You always seem to have passion for your sport, what is your first rallying memory?
Duncan Edwards Via Facebook
Matt Edwards: “It was probably calibrating a trip meter in a Mazda 323. I was sat in the back going down theA55 with my dad [Alyn Edwards] and Ian Hughes in the Mazda 323. They were off to go and do a rally somewhere and they were bombing up and down calibrating the trip or something like that.
“It’s difficult to pick the first memory but that stands out and then, with my dad being clerk of the course on the Cambrian and an observer on BTRDArounds, a lot of memories of being out spectating on those events. Lots of early morning starts – and I remember losing my welly boot in a car park in Hawick on the Border Rally.
“We went back three hours later and the welly was still there in the car park… there’s a few little stories like that.”
MN: But like many drivers who have gone on to great things, that passion’s always been there for you from those earliest memories?
ME: “Oh yes… the amount of times that I used to go up and down the garden on my little go-kart!
“The house had a sloping driveway at the front and then a little path round the side of the house and there was a compression off the driveway for this path on a 45-degree right, then it narrowed through a gatepost, then it started going right across the front of the house, then a little jump off the patio onto the lawn, down the lawn, then there was a path down at the bottom of the lawn that went round some trees that went down to another section of the lawn.
“It was like a little stage that I used to bomb up and down and I wrecked several bits of the chassis on that compression that needed welding and I took the odd wheel off on that gatepost when I got crossed-up coming in, so I did most of my damage to that rather than when I
