David Richards on world rallying and running Aston Martin

“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.”

One of the best things about that success, recalls Richards, was seeing the pride and the change of attitude at Subaru: “They had thought of themselves as ‘little’ Subaru, a second-stringer battling giants like Ford, Toyota and Lancia. But in an amazingly short time, they went from selling pick-ups for pig farmers to performance cars for petrolheads.”

“The Subaru experience taught us a huge amount about what motorsport programmes can achieve,” he says. “There was even a Henley Business School study about how it changes the company’s reputation and how it was perceived. It wasn’t just a ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’ thing; we used our success to recruit engineers, and Subaru suddenly found they could attract the best young Japanese talent. A lot of really good technical stuff was fed into the road cars, and the rally imagery did a lot to sell the cars.”

Setting up Prodrive’s Aston programme – already 19 years old and counting – had a lot to do with another of Richards’ personal qualities: persistence.

“I’ve loved Astons all my life,” he says. “Hounding the management every year to let us set up a race team had become a bit of a religious ritual. So was their usual reply: we just don’t have the money. But when they launched the new DB9 in 2003, it looked like a fresh opportunity.

“They gave me the usual stuff about money but this time I said: ‘Tell you what: I’ll take the risk. I’ll do the development if you allow me a five-year contract to build and sell the cars, do the merchandise, everything. In theory, the DB9 wasn’t the perfect race car, what with a front engine against the mid-engined Ferraris. But the balance of performance regs were just arriving, which helped make a more level playing field. We won at Sebring first time out.”

The Aston business has changed shape a few times but it prospers to this day. There are always plenty of race cars at the Banbury works being built or refurbished. Venerable models come back for rebuilds, some of them now extremely valuable. A 2007 Le Mans winner recently sold at auction for almost £2 million. For five years from 2007, Richards was actually chairman of Aston Martin proper, having led a Kuwaitbacked consortium to acquire Aston Martin from Ford for $925m. The principals were people Richards had first met 30 years before while organising that very first car rally for Rothmans in Kuwait.