David Richards on world rallying and running Aston Martin

Open gallery Close News by Steve Cropley 7 mins read 10 May 2022 Follow @StvCr Share

Famous people achieve their star status by finding something at which they excel, then practising it at the highest level to the exclusion of everything else. Jim Clark was brilliant at winning motor races, but he never designed a car or managed a racing team – and nobody would have expected him to.

David Richards, winner of this year’s Sturmey Award, Autocar’s most personal accolade, has an entirely different way of working. In a long career, he has amassed a wide variety of difficult and diverse successes, and he continues to be active and effective in many areas when ordinary people might think they had done enough. In his twenties, Richards was organising international motorsport events for clients who had already spotted what would soon become his lifelong ability to make things happen. By 30, he had won a World Rally Championship for Ford, co-driving with his friend Ari Vatanen, before retiring early to concentrate on other promising facets of motorsport.

Within a couple of years, he had formed a new company, Prodrive, first to bring Porsche into rallying, then to establish BMW in both rally and racetrack competition. The BMW successes led promptly to a hugely productive 18-year world rallying phase, during which he nurtured the stellar careers of Colin McRae (1995) and Richard Burns (2001) to fruition as world champions.

Britain’s Best Driving Car 2023: Porsche 911 GT3Autocar’s Five-Star Car: Porsche Cayman GT4 RSAutocar Awards 2023: Range Rover Sport named best SUVBest cars and industry heroes recognised in 2023 Autocar AwardsAutocar Awards 2023: the Honda Civic Type R is our Best Fun Car

Meanwhile, on the circuits, Prodrive ran saloon campaigns for Alfa Romeo, Honda and Ford, also building a 10-car batch of ‘private’ Ferrari 550M endurance racers, one of which won the GT1 class at Le Mans in 2003. Over Richards’ 50-year business career, there are almost too many diverse highlights to list: stints as team principal with the Benetton and BAR F1 teams, the establishment of a highly successful Aston Martin GT racing operation that continued to prosper (Prodrive has built upwards of 200 Aston GT racers since 2004) and close involvement in a rethink of the ways British motorsport is governed, as chairman of the renamed Motorsport UK.

Most recently, Richards and Prodrive have set up the Bahrain Raid Xtreme off-road team and programme, starring nine-time WRC champion Sébastien Loeb and an all-new car called BRX Hunter. The car promises a whole new avenue of opportunity for the Banbury company: Richards seems to specialise in finding them. How does he do it? He’ll tell you luck is involved, but of course there’s much more to it than that.

“So much about life is being in the right place at the right time,” he says.

“But that’s not the main thing. You’ve got to see opportunities as they come – and they will – and then grab them with both hands. The trick is not to be risk-averse.”

He cites a perfect example: “I was 23 years old, had just finished my accountancy articles and was co-driving for Tony Pond in rallies, doing a kind of motorsport gap year. I went to see Rothmans to ask for sponsorship – tobacco companies were big sponsors back then – and got the usual don’t-call-us message. But something I said must have lodged because they rang me a few days later. This isn’t a sponsorship offer, they said, but could you help us with something?

Latest Drives

BMW X7 xDrive40d M Sport

Renault Clio E-Tech 2023 first drive

Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio 2023 first drive

Polestar 2 Long Range Single Motor RWD 2023 first drive

Peugeot 3008 136 e-DCS6 Hybrid 2023 first drive

View all latest drives

“It turned out to be a request to go to Kuwait and organise a car rally, leaving the following day! The event was imminent and the guy organising it had been shot. So I went – and finished up organising the first international rally they’d ever had. It was a modest event but it went pretty well and I made friends in the Gulf that I still have after all these years.”

The sponsors must have been happy too, because they were soon back on the phone asking Richards to organise a similar event in Qatar, this time from scratch. It was a tall order. He had no contacts there, so he decided to try to enlist the aid of the chief of police: “I waited three days outside his office until he was free to see me, but when he did give me some time, we had a good conversation and he agreed to help. That event went well, too.”

Richards lists his next career milestone as meeting Vatanen, the Finnish rally star who later became a prominent EU politician but remains a great friend to this day: “Ari was on his first trip to the UK and didn’t speak much English, but he had the same kind of farming background as me so he came to stay with us in North Wales. We got on well and started doing stuff together and got pretty successful. Then we went to the Ford factory team and won the world championship.”

Richards’ next highlight, the deal to run Subaru’s WRC team, ostensibly arrived out of the blue too, but it was actually a result of Prodrive’s rally success with their BMW team: “A friend told us that a man from Subaru, Mr Kuze, would be at Heathrow on his way back to Tokyo from the Safari Rally and wanted to see us. I didn’t even know who Subaru were; I had to look them up.

“Anyway, we picked Mr Kuze up from the airport and had a meeting here in Banbury. He told us they were building a new car, the Impreza, aimed at a younger audience. He’d seen us run our BMWs, and as long as we could come up with a sensible proposal, he said they’d like us to help them run an Impreza team in the World Rally Championship. It was the beginning of an 18-year relationship. We didn’t have the resources back then, but we had great engineers and plenty of ambition. Four years later [in 1995], we won the championship with Colin McRae.”