Who Is Andy Rouse?
Andrew Ernest Rouse is a British racing driver who won the British Saloon Car Championship four times. He was born in Dymock, Gloucestershire, on 2 December 1947, won the Ford Escort Mexico Challenge in 1972, and took his first class title in the championship in 1973 with Team Esso Uniflo.
The first outright title came in 1975 in a Triumph Dolomite Sprint. Eight years passed before the second: he spent the late 1970s and early 1980s in Class D Ford Capris, winning nothing outright, before an Alfa Romeo GTV6 took him to the 1983 championship.
Then he won three in a row of his own making. The 1984 title came in a Rover Vitesse and the 1985 title in a Ford Sierra XR4Ti prepared by his own firm, Andy Rouse Engineering. The company went on to develop the Ford Sierra RS500 into the dominant Group A touring car of the late 1980s, and Rouse won nine races from thirteen starts with it in 1988.
He raced in the championship until 1994, latterly in Toyota Carinas and then the Ford Mondeo, and finished with sixty race wins. At the time that was the outright record; it stood for more than twenty years, until Jason Plato passed it.
