Meet the YouTuber – Matt from Furious Driving

When I registered a YouTube channel name and website a decade ago I didn’t really have a plan, just some ideas and a name - taken from then new Top Gear when Jeremy Clarkson declared the only driving offence on the Isle of Man was ‘Furious Driving’ - which I thought sounded quite catchy.

None of those ideas lasted very long and the current Furious Driving is nothing like I could have imagined or even existed in the late 2000s, although it turns out Furious Driving was the first driving offence in most of the British Isles, and I’ve since found the plaque on the Isle of Wight commemorating the UK’s issuing of it.

Having worked as an automotive and PR photographer for many years the last thing I expected to be doing at my age would be a professional YouTuber. Furious Driving in its early incarnation began when I visited classic car dealers to shoot and write cars for sale on test reviews and popped a couple of GoPro’s on the test cars to make a short video of the drive and experiment with editing which always got a few views and kept me entertained.

It was good groundwork to build a channel and it even started making a bit of pocket money, but as the magazine industry began to change, I decided to make YouTube a bigger part of my freelance mix. I’d been blogging about my cars for years as part of a magazine staff car diary, so it was sort of natural to start doing it on camera, but when I filmed my first car review talking about my Rover 2000 (which I’ve owned since I was 17), I instantly found two things.

First, talking on camera is much harder than it looks, and some people will go into the comments to tell you you’re wrong no matter what. I’ve heard it said it takes about 50 videos to get the hang of presenting, and that’s probably not far wrong. Those old videos are still up, but I wouldn’t recommend watching them!

This all happened just before 2020, and we know what happened that year. Just before the first lockdown I’d bought a Volvo 740 for £175 for a cheap car challenge, fortunately it was broken and I parked it along with my other cars around where I live. I spent that summer fixing and filming the cars and live chatting on the channel and came out of covid with a lot more subscribers, but more importantly a community of car fans and other car YouTubers.

Back then I thought I had too many cars with eight on the Furious Fleet, but having a channel that needs new metal to feed views and an army of viewers who know what I like, finding all those cars I’ve always wanted is sometimes too easy, so I’ve been able to collect a pretty unique collection of cars. Awkwardly, in my latest fleet round up video, it turns out that’s more than doubled now!

A Rover 200Vi, a forgotten hot hatch, arrived with a blown head gasket and now lives alongside its contemporary rival Alfa 145 Cloverleaf and I now have the oldest Fiat Punto in the UK as well as a pre-production Mini Cooper.

The equation for comedy is pain + distance=funny, and the same is true for content and it seems the worse my day the more people like it! As I don’t like to see any car scrapped, that has put me in a bit of a bind more than once.

For a long time my weird dream car has been the Ford Crown Vic, particularly the Police Interceptor version, so whenever I went to the US I would make sure all the cabs I got were Vics, and I would be spotting the police cars. Finally, I bought and imported one, but I’d been scammed and the sills were made of expanding foam and filler so I had to spend a summer welding it up.

So, when the abandoned Mercedes W123 I rescued turned out to be rustier than expected I had to draw a line. I had managed to change the locks, rebuild the K Jetronic fuel injection and make it run and done a bit of welding, but when I found yet more rust decided it was too much.  Fortunately 6D Diesels, a welding channel, came to the rescue and will take care of the metal work for me this year, so it too will be saved!

Other abandoned and saved success stories have included a Mk2 Mondeo so filthy it had its own ecosystem, and a Rover 216 Cabrio. Both are still running and with new owners today.

Although I spend lots of time and videos fixing cars, I’d rather be driving them and have had some adventures with them, taking the Volvo 740 2000 miles in a long weekend to go back to the factory museum in Gothenburg (where the clutch broke and we were towed off the motorway by a Swede in a ‘70s Jag - thanks Adam from Living with a Classic). It was the kind of road trip I love, seeing the changing landscapes and cities across Europe and crossing the incredible bridges from Denmark into Sweden, and it was just in time as the museum closed soon afterwards.

If I were the sort of person to make new year’s resolutions, mine would be to make sure I do more road trips this year.

A big part of the channel is the car reviews. Perhaps my biggest challenge is finding cars to make sure there’s a fresh one every week, especially at this time of year when I’ve run down the reserves and classic cars are tucked away, but this has given me the opportunity to drive some incredible, rare and dream cars.

Most people have never seen a Hustler. I’ve driven two of them now! I’ve also driven several Austin 7s, which made me want one quite a lot, and other pre-war cars. The Morris Minor was notable thanks to the reversed brake and accelerator pedals, which takes some getting used to, and my all-time dream car, the Cord 810.

This is an incredible machine, pop up headlights and front wheel drive in 1936, and an electro pneumatic pre-selector gearbox. They say never meet your heroes, but that was a great day and I need to add one to the fleet one day!

People often ask if there are cars I’m looking for to review or if I worry I’ll run out, but there are so many I’m happy to review anything and I think I have a few years of content to go!