Attractive a contest involving fire-starting (8,1,5)

'fire-starting' is the definition.
I don't know anything about this answer so I cannot judge whether it can be defined by this definition.

'attractive a contest' is the wordplay.
I cannot really understand how this works, but
'a' is present in the answer.
'contest' could be 'match' (match is a kind of contest) and 'match' is present in the answer.
The remaining letters 'striking' is a valid word which might be clued in a way I don't see.
This explanation may well be incorrect...

'involving' acts as a link.

Can you help me to learn more?