Mat Armstrong Number Plate Collection

Why Does Mat Armstrong Use BMX in His Number Plates?

Before the salvage builds, before the Lamborghinis, and before an audience of over six million YouTube subscribers, Mat Armstrong was a professional BMX rider. Born in Leicester in 1993 and raised in part by his father Tony, a skilled mechanic who ran his own garage, Mat grew up with two passions running in parallel: riding bikes and fixing cars. His BMX career took him across Europe and the Middle East, competing in France, Germany, Barcelona, and Dubai from his mid-teens. It came to an abrupt end at the BMX World Championships in Germany, where a dislocated shoulder during a qualifying run forced him to retire from the sport entirely. What followed was a pivot that nobody, including Mat, could have fully predicted. A crashed Audi TT belonging to his girlfriend, bought back from the insurance for £600 and rebuilt on camera, became the template for everything that came after. The salvage rebuild format was born, and Mat Armstrong the automotive YouTuber began. BMX never left him though. It shapes how he talks about himself, how he signs off on social media, and most visibly, what he puts on his number plates. The Collection It started in February 2019 with MA06 BMX , bought for his girlfriend's Audi TT. A modest purchase at the time, it set a template he has followed ever since. That same plate now lives on his Lamborghini Gallardo, a journey in itself from a crashed daily driver to an Italian V10. From there the collection grew, with BMX woven into almost every car in the fleet: RO11 BMX on the Rolls-Royce Wraith, formerly owned by Marcus Rashford and subsequently given the full Mansory treatment. CU11 BMX on the flood-damaged Rolls-Royce Cullinan, one of his most ambitious salvage projects. MA02 BMX on the Lamborghini Murcielago. OO07 BMX on the Aston Martin Vantage. MA07 BMX on his BMW 140i. There are exceptions. The Mercedes C63 AMG wears GF61 EJZ . The Maserati Granturismo carries E99 CGX . The McLaren 720S has BR18 FJK . The Porsche 911 runs PF22 CPZ . And the Ferrari 430 displays MX05 HCD , which contains the MX element if not the full BMX. Whether Mat is biding his time on the right plate for each of these cars, or whether they simply arrived before the right combination presented itself, the gaps are notable. The Exception: 11 YUN Then there is the Bugatti Veyron, arguably the most ambitious project Mat has ever taken on. A repossessed example purchased for a significantly lower price than the car's usual market value, it arrived with an immediate catalogue of challenges: misfires, a leaky radiator, fuse-box issues, and a gearbox problem that Bugatti quoted in the region of £300,000 to fix. Mat's solution was a fuse from Halfords. Bugatti have since refused to supply parts outside their authorised network, making the rebuild as much a logistical battle as a mechanical one. The car came with a registration, and wore another famous plate previously. 1 MCY was sold at the DVLA September 1994 auction for a hammer price of £2,900. It then sat on a retention document for years before eventually being assigned to the Veyron, a plate quietly waiting for the right car to arrive. It was then replaced by… 11 YUN has a different character entirely. The YUN area code was first issued in July 1961, though it is worth noting that original issues from that period followed the conventional format of numbers before letters. 11 YUN is a reverse dateless, a format where the letters precede the number, and the highly desirable double-digit 11 gives it particular appeal. It sold at the DVLA January 2020 auction for a hammer price of £1,570, and on the 20th of March 2023 it was assigned to the Bugatti Veyron that Mat now owns. The plate wasn’t chosen by Mat in the way his BMX collection was. It came with the car. But it tells the story of the Veyron before it ever arrived in his garage: two registrations acquired years apart at DVLA auction, eventually finding their way onto one of only 450 Veyrons ever produced, and then landing in the hands of a BMX rider from Leicester who fixed the gearbox with a fuse from Halfords. Why It Matters The BMX plates are not a branding exercise. They are a genuine tribute to the sport that shaped Mat, gave him discipline, took him around the world, and ultimately, through injury and necessity, redirected him toward the career that made him one of the most watched automotive creators in the country. Every BMX suffix on every car in that collection is a quiet acknowledgement that none of it would exist without the bike that came first. One plate worth mentioning in this context is BMX 1T, owned by IBMXF World Champion Craig Schofield, one of the most celebrated competitive BMX riders the sport has produced. Whether Mat ever pursues it is unknown, but as a homage to a shared passion, it would be a fitting addition.