ELFYN EVANS

The Welsh rally ace and Red Bull athlete talks handbrake turns and Hiluxes

My dad was away quite a lot when I was young – he was driving in the British Championship and doing World Championship bits too – so it was my grandfather who taught me how to drive when I was eight.

My uncle has a farm, and that was where I learnt. My grandfather used to do a schoolrun and it was always a bit of a thing for me to go and turn the minibus around in the yard. I remember collecting a gatepost once – he wasn’t so happy.

The family business was, and still is, a Ford dealership. That meant when I was about 11, I ended up with a scrapped MkI Fiesta in a field. I learnt to do handbrake turns and reverse flicks and all that stuff, although the car ended up on fire in the end. It backfired one morning while I was waiting for it to warm up and off it went.

When I was 12 or 13, I did some local banger racing in an old Datsun. I did very little competitive driving as a kid, though. No karting, no autograss – I was more into my motorbike trials and a bit of motocross.

The first time I properly got into cars was when I was 13 and started working in the dealership. When I got to schoolleaving age, I had two projects on the go. One, to get my first road car, and two, to get my first rally car. It took a lot of persuading to get my dad to allow me to do that.

Eventually I did a test day for a Formula 1000 Rally thing. It was for 1000cc cars and aimed at younger drivers. The first car that I built cost £250. I can’t remember what it was, but it had big axe gouges in the roof for some reason. It was basically a cage, seats and a fire extinguisher. I had to try and build what I could of it myself and then I had a bit of help from the guys in the garage to finish it off. I actually didn’t get it quite ready for the first round so I had to borrow a car – then I rolled mine on round three or four anyway.

At that time, dad knew the importance of left-hand drive for rallying though, and soon after, I managed to find a LHD Nissan Micra for a few hundred quid more. Luckily, I’d already started converting that, so when I crashed the first car I just transferred all the bits into the Micra.

My first road car was a MkVI Ford Escort. It was the workshop runabout and was an ex-Motability car, so it’d had the dash cut out and the seat removed for wheelchair access. I put RS2000 brakes on it and bought cheap parts to make it look like an RS2000 replica. I tried to fully respray it too, which wasn’t so successful... but at least you learn along the way.

I can’t remember what I had after that. I know it was something LHD, though. I wanted to practise as much as possible, and I’ve driven left-hand-drive road cars more or less ever since.

I had a MkI Focus RS for about 11 months in 2010, but as soon as the rallying got a bit more serious, I sold it to fund a new car. I bought two donor cars when I started in R2 rallying – one was to build the rally car and the other was a Fiesta Zetec S that I converted into a recce car, but which also had to do as my everyday road car. And yeah, the road cars went downhill from there really.

Since I’ve joined Toyota, the team has helped me out driving things that are a little bit better. I’m in a Hilux at the minute, which is handy for mountain biking and motorbiking. I’m hoping I can be sorted with a LHD car, though – I’ve got my eye on the new GR Yaris.