Prodrive Circuit Racing
Alfa Romeo had won the British Touring Car Championship in 1994, with cars run by Alfa Corse. Prodrive took over the running of the cars for the 1995 season. However, the Alfa was not the dominant force it had been, and the highest-placed driver, reigning champion Gabriele Tarquini, finished only 16th in the championship. Alfa Romeo withdrew at the end of the season. In 1997 and 1998 Prodrive ran the Honda Touring Car Team, before working with Ford in 1999 and 2000. After re-engineering the Ford Mondeo, the team won the BTCC title in 2000 with Alain Menu. It was the last year Super Touring Cars would compete in the BTCC.
In 2001, Richards took Prodrive into sports car racing as the team designed a new Ferrari 550 GTS Maranello to compete in the FIA GT championship. This was a privately backed programme, independent from Ferrari. Between 2001 and 2004, ten cars were made and the highlight came in 2003, when the team won the GT1 class at Le Mans against the factory-backed Corvettes. In late 2003, Richards announced that Prodrive had signed an agreement with Aston Martin to take the British sports car manufacturer back into motor racing with the formation of a new team called Aston Martin Racing. The new Aston Martin DBR9 was unvield at Gaydon in late 2004 and first competed at the 12 Hours of Sebring in 2005, winning on its debut. The DBR9 won two Le Mans GT1 titles in 2007 and 2008, the latter with the car running in the Gulf Oil livery.
In 2009, the team launched its new LMP1 car, the DBR1/2, which featured a Lola chassis, mated to a modified production-based DBR9 engine. The team won the Le Mans Series in 2009 and finished fourth at Le Mans the same year as the fastest petrol powered car. In September 2010 at Silverstone, Richards unveiled an all-new Aston Martin LMP1 car to compete at Le Mans in 2011.
Prodrive continued to compete in the European Touring Car Championship in 2002 with Volvo and in 2003 launched the Ford Performance Racing team in the Australian V8 Supercar Series, a programme it continues to run today.
Read more about this topic: David Richards (racing)
Famous quotes containing the words circuit and/or racing:
“The Father and His angelic hierarchy
That made the magnitude and glory there
Stood in the circuit of a needle’s eye.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)