LOUISE AITKEN-WALKER FIRST AMONG EQUALS: A RALLY DRIVER’S LIFE

If you were to pick the biggest stars of British rallying who went on to win honours on the World championship stages, names like Roger Clark, Malcolm Wilson or Tony Pond would be high on the list. So too would the great co-drivers, including Fred Gallagher, David Richards or Nicky Grist – never forgetting our late drivers’ champions, Richard Burns and Colin McRae.

But high amid this firmament of our ‘best of the best’ in the WRC, Louise Aitken-Walker MBE stands tall as the first British driver to claim a title from the world’s top rally series, for which she also joined the elite pantheon of RAC Segrave Trophy recipients.

Aitken-Walker’s bid to claim the 1990 WRC Ladies’ Cup was ultimately successful despite it almost taking her life and that of co-driver Tina Thorner in a terrifying accident on Rally Portugal. Her career was characterised by a drive and desire to succeed that was evident from first taking part in a Ford-funded series for women more than a decade earlier.

Having retired from full-time competition in 1993 to focus on her family and the successful car dealership that she and husband Graham have maintained in her hometown of Duns to this day, Aitken-Walker took time out from work and her beloved horses to tackle the posers put to her by MN’s readership:

Question: What is it about the Borders that makes motorsport such a part of life, and why do you think so much talent has come from there?

Ed McFarlane Via Twitter

LA-W: “That’s a very good question. I think in the old days it was based on farmers. Farmers had the opportunity to take their kids out and, you know, they had to work on the farm. I learnt as well to drive a Land Rover when I was 10.

I remember being put in the seat of this Land Rover with a massive steering wheel for me then, and my father would put a turnip on the accelerator to say what speed he would want to go, and I would steer while he would be out the back of the Land Rover throwing the turnips out to the cattle or whatever.

So you would get to know cars before you were legal to drive on the road.

Competition [driving] is like the national sport up here.

“Duns has got a population of 3000 people and probably a third or half of them are involved – competitors, marshals, officials, spectators – we’re