40 years of Prodrive: tracing the story of motorsport success

His Rothmans contacts provided early work at the March Formula 1 team, but that didn’t last long. “Our car wasn’t good,” he explains, “and when it failed to qualify at Monaco, with two Marlboro [sponsored] cars at the front, it seemed a good time to advise them to stop.

“One of the drivers, Jochen Mass, was very close to Rothmans, and I’d heard that Porsche was getting back into sports car racing, so I suggested to Jochen that we approach Rothmans to sponsor a Porsche team.”

That led to a commitment on both sides, and a successful team was built from 1983, starring big names like Mass, Derek Bell, Jacky Ickx, Vern Schuppan and Stefan Bellof.

Richards also heard Porsche was building a 959 rally car to Group B rules, which presented an opportunity to build his own rally team. He ran an early car for Porsche in the 1983 Qatar Rally: it won but almost broke in half.

After that, Porsche began running its own cars, so Richards and his band lobbied to get one of their own – a request that was granted but that turned out to be a shell and a pile of bits. A credible car was created in short order by master engineer David Lapworth, recently arrived from the Peugeot Talbot sports department. He has been one of Richards’ ‘wise men’ ever since. The British-entered 959 soon started winning in Europe and the Middle East.

The team was tagged Rothmans Porsche Rally Team, but the operator was a new entity called David Richards Autosport, based in a former tyre-fitting shop near the entrance to Silverstone circuit.

“I’d heard about a Swiss lawyer looking to get into driver representation, who already had parallel businesses that were called something like Proserve [for tennis] and Progolf,” explains Richards. “It struck me that Prodrive sounded good, so we started using that and it stuck.”

When the controversial Group B category was discontinued in 1986, the firm’s prospects looked rocky for a time, but Richards soon secured an introduction to BMW Motorsport boss Wolfgang-Peter Flohr, who had started selling race car kits for M3s. 

The Prodrive crew reckoned these could be adapted for rallying, and by chance Flohr had been talking to a French team interested in the same thing. Lapworth and co (Prodrive now had about 20 employees) set about adapting the roll-cage and suspension and built a new racing dog ’box to replace the weak, all-synchromesh five-speeder.

Prodrive started finding customers in Belgium, Italy and France. It moved to better premises in Banbury at about the same time and started finding its feet. “We entered the 1987 Corsica Rally and won,” recalls Lapworth. “It was the start of everything.”

Prodrive built 38 competition M3s over about three years, including BTCC track versions for Frank Sytner, who did very well. That launched Prodrive into track race cars, building them first for BMW, then Alfa Romeo, Honda, Ford and Volvo.

But the biggest deal of all was back on the rally scene: a request from a mysterious Mr Kuze, who represented the obscure Subaru company. He had watched Prodrive’s M3s in the 1000 Lakes Rally and been impressed enough to request a meeting with Richards.

They brought him to the headquarters, lunched him, talked cars a lot, then delivered him to the airport. It led to an offer to campaign Subarus in WRC events on behalf of the factory. By the time he was back at his desk in Tokyo, a proposal from Richards had arrived, explaining how it could be done. Ryuichiro Kuze would be Prodrive’s prime Japanese contact for the next 18 years.

“Once again, the timing was perfect,” explains Richards. “The BMW had been good for us, but it was getting less competitive, because it didn’t have four-wheel drive. We knew so little about Subaru that we had to look them up in books.

But we soon found that the Legacy, the car they first wanted to campaign, had the two things that really mattered: a turbocharger and four-wheel drive. Nothing else mattered as much.”

The first entry was driven by Markku Alén in the 1990 Acropolis Rally. He won the first stage but had a suspension breakage on the second. He kept going, though, and finished fourth.

From there, the modern history of Prodrive began: the 18 stellar Subaru years, the rise to iconic status of Colin McRae and Richard Burns, the regular victories and the titles that changed the image of Subaru forever. But then it ended.

“The recession was really starting to bite,” recalls Richards, “and when the Japanese management saw that Honda weren’t being pilloried for withdrawing from F1 on economic grounds, they did the same [from the WRC].”

By then, the Aston Martin Racing programme was in full swing at Prodrive, having begun in 2004, soon after the all-new DB9 reached production. For six years from 2007, Richards was actually chairman of Aston, having led a buyout from Ford on behalf of Middle Eastern investors. Although it has changed shape a few times, Prodrive still has a huge business preparing racing Astons (there are at least 500 in action around the world), and those with the best provenance sell for eye-watering prices.