Growing up in motor racing title-winning family, it was almost destiny that Jade Edwards would make her way into the cockpit of a racing car.
Her grandfather Jim was the Renault 5 Turbo king in 1979 and her dad Jim Junior was a multiple champion in French one-make machines too. Jade and her sister Chloe were ingrained in the touring car paddock from as early as they can both remember and so it was natural that the genes would lead to them to the tracks.
The sisters began racing in the Ginetta Junior contest as teenagers in 2006 before going on to myriad steps up the motor racing ladder. Jade’s career path so far has taken her through Mazdas, the one-make Aston Martin GT4 Challenge, British GT outings and on to, inevitably, the Renault UK Clio Cup.
Jade made her debut in the British Touring Car Championship as the first female in a decade on the grid when she handled the Power Maxed Racing Vauxhall Astra at Silverstone in 2020 amid a blaze of publicity.
Since then, she has gone on to become a fixture on the tin-top grid and is in her third full season at the level in 2023. After switching from five early-season rounds with Team Hard in a Cupra R, the fan favourite has now returned to the One Motorsport team (formerly BTC Racing) that she enjoyed a great relationship with in 2021 and 2022.
She is hoping to use that team change to her advantage and has been knocking hard on the door of a breakthrough result.
She kindly took time out of her preparations for last weekend’s meeting at Donington Park to tackle the MN readers’ questions, and her answers are revealing.
Question: You were born into motor racing. Was it something you and your sister Chloe were always destined to take part in?
James Woods
Via email
Jade Edwards: “I think it was. I went to my first race track when I was two weeks old when my dad was racing in the one-make Renault 5 Turbo series and it was the year he won the championship in 1990. So I arrived and a fortnight later it was another race weekend, and so I was taken along too.
“For myself and my sister, it is all we have ever wanted to do. I remember people asking what I wanted to be when I was older, and I would always say ‘racing driver’. It was never a mechanic, it was never an engineer. It was always the driving aspect that interested me.”
MN: At that stage, it must have been hard for people to take you seriously because it wasn’t the usual career ambition for a female…
“Maybe. But because of my upbringing [within the sport] I was never made to feel like my answer to that question was stupid. Even when I was younger and I had toys for Christmas, if there was a choice between Barbie and Action Man, it would be Action Man because he did loads more cool stuff than Barbie! And there was no following sentence from anyone in the family of ‘well, but…[Barbie is a girls’ toy]’. I never felt anything was out of reach for me, and that is just because of the family I was around and grew up
