Winning the right way

He chose co-driving because he ‘wasn’t fast enough in the other seat,’ he tells us. ‘I told Ari I only wanted to win that one World Championship. I didn’t want to carry on forever. We had young children at home and in those days you would be on a rally for three weeks, testing for two weeks beforehand. You would have a couple of days at home, then off you go again. I didn’t think that was the best environment to bring children up in. I wanted to start my own team instead.’

He founded Prodrive in 1984, initially building and running Porsche 911 rally cars with notable success in the Middle East. Those cars wore Rothmans liveries – David had nurtured the relationship with the British tobacco giant during the Vatanen years and taken Rothmans (and its money) along with him into the Prodrive era. Without it, David Richards might be remembered today by just a handful of weathered old rally obsessives as a title-winning co-driver from some time in the early 1980s.

‘I said to the CEO of Rothmans, “Why don’t we form a rally team? I can do that for you.” And that’s where we started – 14 of us sitting around a lunch table in a tiny lock up at Silverstone. We used to sit there and say, you know guys, one day we could win a World Championship.’ He was 30 years old.

Those championships would come, and we’ll get to them shortly, but there is an important point to be made about the value of nurturing relationships over not only years, but decades. It was 18 years after his Rothmans-backed founding of Prodrive that David received a call for help – Rothmans again, known by then as British American Tobacco.

‘It was the chairman this time. He said they needed my help. They had invested all this money into a Formula 1 team [British American Racing, or BAR], paid fortunes for it, and they hadn’t scored many championship points. The budget was out of control and they needed me to help them sort it out.’

Timing was everything. Formula 1 was scheduled to ban cigarette sponsorship in 2006, meaning British American Tobacco had just a few years to get its underperforming F1 team in order and fit for sale, or be left holding onto an expensive asset that had no marketing value and no meaningful worth to buyers. It was a desperate situation. ‘After quite a long negotiation,’ says David, ‘we came to an agreement and I was given the contract for five years. The job was to get the budget under control, score some points, then flog the team to anybody, just to get out of it.’

Prodrive began running the BAR team in 2002 with David installed as Team Principal. That first season yielded seven World Championship points, the next 26 points and fifth in the Constructors’ championship. The third year provided no fewer than 11 podiums and 119 points – enough for second in the standings behind the dominant Ferrari. Jenson Button was best of the rest, finishing third in the Drivers’ championship behind Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello.

The five-year job was done in three. Honda bought the Brackley team in time for the 2005 season. It soon evolved into Brawn GP for that extraordinary 2009 season – still F1’s greatest ever story, in my view – and a year later it became the works Mercedes squad with all the record-breaking success that would follow.

I asked David how he reflects on his time as a Formula 1 Team Principal. He is searingly honest: ‘I didn’t enjoy it very much. It wasn’t my style. It was like a battleground, with everyone looking out for their own interests, stabbing each other in the back. I don’t flourish in that sort of environment. I like a collaborative environment where you’re working together.’ They don’t call it The Piranha Club for nothing.

I suspect David has been happier in the more collegiate environs of a World Rally Championship service park or endurance racing paddock, and indeed that is where Prodrive’s real success has come. It is a shame Prodrive’s 19-year partnership in the WRC with Subaru faded like it did – not a single rally victory in any of its final three seasons, culminating in Subaru quitting the sport at the end of 2008 – because that is often how these things tend to be remembered. That relationship, though, was wonderfully successful, and the success came fast. The Subaru Legacy RS emerged from Prodrive’s Banbury HQ in 1990, scored multiple podiums over the following two seasons and became a winner in 1993.

Then the Impreza arrived. Three rally victories in 1994 earned Prodrive and Subaru second in the Constructors’ championship, which became first a year later with McRae winning the Drivers’ title. Four more WRC championships followed in quick succession. Even after all these years, the Impreza is the joint most successful rally car ever, tied on 46 rally wins with the Lancia Delta Integrale.

This once little-known Japanese manufacturer had become a household name. The Impreza became one of the most iconic rally cars of all time, perhaps the most iconic, and its blue and gold livery one of the most recognisable in all of motorsport – despite being nothing more or less than a mistake.

‘Everyone remembers the gold wheels,’ says David. ‘The wheel manufacturer was Speedline, from Italy, and the wheels were supposed to be charcoal grey. Peter Stevens had designed the car, and he was appalled to hear Speedline had sent the wrong colour. We looked at the car and said, it’ll have to do. We won the next rally, and I went to the president of Subaru to thank him and apologise for the wheels. I said we would send them back to have them painted grey. He said, “No, no, we’ve done all the advertising, you’ve got to remain with gold wheels from now on.” And that’s how the gold wheels happened. It wasn’t by design. It was a complete cock up, quite frankly.’

Nowadays Prodrive is associated just as closely with Aston Martin, having run its endurance racing programme since 2005. Aston Martin Racing has won the GTE class at Le Mans five times in 20 years. ‘If I ever want to cheer myself up, I watch the last two laps of the 2017 Le Mans with our car and the Corvette. It is mind blowing, and it puts a smile on my face every time. To win on the last lap is just extraordinary. We’ve won 11 endurance championships over the years. Aston Martin will always be very close to my heart.’

In his current chairman role at Motorsport UK, David has been instrumental in transforming the governing body previously known as the Motor Sports Association from a dry and faceless regulator, an issuer of permits and licences, to a far friendlier and more approachable organisation that exists to promote and encourage motorsport in this country. Moving headquarters from a drab industrial estate at the end of a Heathrow runway to its current home at Bicester Motion was the centrepiece of that transformation. Today, Motorsport UK lives right at the heart of the community it serves. David says he is as proud of that as anything else he has achieved in his working life.

But more than the wins at Le Mans, the success in F1, all those WRC titles or establishing Prodrive as one of the UK’s leading motorsport and advanced technologies businesses, I think David should be most proud for doing it all the right way. In an environment that has so often rewarded the unscrupulous for protecting their own interests at the expense of all others, or for bending the rules until they are groaning under the strain, then bending them a little bit more, Prodrive has conducted itself with integrity.

‘I spent a lot of time working on the whole culture of the organisation,’ he says, ‘and how we behave towards each other, how we think about what we’re trying to achieve. We want to win, but we want to win on sensible terms, we don’t want to win at all costs. We behave appropriately. And as a result of that, we have won friends all over the world, and people respect the way we go about our business. It has served us very well.’

But yes, there was that failure to become an accountant – and we should all be thankful for it.