How a Le Mans powerhouse grew from humble origins

From little acorns. Prodrive’s involvement in sportscar racing didn’t begin with a mega factory deal with a budget to match. Rather, it all started with a car bought from the small ads in one of the UK broadsheets. It was stripped in the workshop and in the space of barely four months turned into a GT racer good enough to notch up a maiden victory at only its second attempt. A quarter of a century on, the British engineering specialist has built approaching 500 GT racing cars, not to mention a smattering of prototypes, and taken victories in pretty much all the big races. On Prodrive’s CV are no fewer than eight class wins at the Le Mans 24 Hours, six with its in-house team and two with customer operations running its machinery. 

Prodrive is celebrating its 25th consecutive appearance at Le Mans this week. It explains why an organisation for so long synonymous with tin-tops, for the race track and the rally stage, is perhaps now best known for its endurance exploits. It has flown the flag for Aston Martin for the past 21 and a half seasons in just about every category of sportscar racing there’s been in that time — GT1, GT2 and GTE, GT3 and GT4, and LMP1 - but the Prodrive sportscar story began with Ferrari, or rather one of its cars. Hence that search through the classifieds for a suitable 550 Maranello to convert into a racing machine. 

The tale began late in 2000 when Fredy Dor, a Prodrive customer and regular with its Allstars rally team, purchased one of a short run of 550 Millennios built for the FIA GT Championship by Italtecnica Engineering in Italy. He was unconvinced by the car and took it to Prodrive’s Banbury HQ near Silverstone to get a second opinion. Engineer George Howard-Chappell, who’d masterminded the operation’s British Touring Car Championship programme with Ford in 1999-2000, was even less impressed. He told Dor that if he wanted Prodrive’s help they’d be better off starting again. 

The Millennio project had been funded by FIA GT Championship boss Stephane Ratel and made possible by a new rule he’d forced through at the FIA that allowed specialist tuners to build and then crucially homologate GT machinery independent of the car’s manufacturer. Prodrive took advantage of the same technical passport system to develop what became the 550 GTS Maranello independent of Ferrari. The starting point was a road car was purchased from, says Howard-Chappell, a "back street dealer off the Kings Road" in Fulham.

"If I remember, it was 57 grand," he says. "I asked the bloke selling it if the thing had ever been in a shunt and then asked him to start it up. I told him I'd be back the following day with a banker’s draft. He asked if I wanted to drive it, and I said 'no'. All I cared about was that the chassis was straight and that the engine ran."

The car was ready to race in time for the Silverstone FIA GT round in May 2001. A homologation row over the gearbox prevented the Ferrari from participating that weekend, delaying its debut until the Hungaroring round in July. The Prodrive-run car non-finished on debut, but the following month Rickard Rydell and Peter Kox triumphed on a scorching hot day at the A1-Ring. The drivers were very nearly fried in the cockpit over the course of the three-hour race. So much so that a dehydrated Rydell had to pull over on the hard shoulder of the motorway on his way to the airport after the race and was found lying on the grass taking a breather by another team member. 

Having dropped out with a mechanical while leading on debut, Prodrive made amends with victory in 2003

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Rydell, this time partnered by another veteran of the Ford BTCC programme in Alain Menu, triumphed again at Jarama in September before the season was out. The following year, Prodrive left the FIA GT series to its first customer, ex-Formula 1 team Scuderia Italia and moved on to bigger things. After an exploratory outing under Automobile Club de l’Ouest rules at the Petit Le Mans American Le Mans Series round at Road Atlanta in October in ’01, Prodrive contested the Sebring 12 Hours ALMS fixture the following March in preparation for the first of its 25 Le Mans starts. 

The car dominated qualifying. Alain Menu, making his first Le Mans appearance, was fastest in the GTS class on the opening day of qualifying and then Tomas Enge sealed the deal on Thursday to claim the first of a run of poles aboard Prodrive GT machinery. The car, in which they were joined by Rydell, went on to establish a two-lap lead over the chasing Corvette Racing entries before an oil leak resulted in a flash fire and the car’s retirement. A year later, Prodrive put things right and took the first of its Le Mans class victories with a Maranello shared by Enge, Kox and Jamie Davies.

Prodrive built a total of 10 Maranellos in period, all built up from road cars. The Fulham dealer supplied a second Ferrari, Dor offered up his car to the cause and Carsport Holland boss Toine Hezemans, a rival from the FIA GT paddock, sold Prodrive his Ferrari. Yet it might not have had to be that way. Prodrive founder and chairman David Richards sought a deal with Ferrari whereby Prodrive would build up the cars from chassis supplied from Italy and, crucially, an official Ferrari racing chassis plate. The cars would then be ‘finished’ in Maranello before their delivery to customers. 

Prodrive followed the same business model as it had with the Ferrari, so once again there was no fat cheque. Revenue would be derived from the sale of cars and spares. But the programme was "a breath of fresh air"

“I went down to Maranello to speak to Jean Todt [head of racing at Ferrari] and said, ‘We'd like to build these with official blessing’,” recalls Richards. "He thought it was a good idea and I thought we had a deal.” Howard-Chappell reckons Ferrari was always going to be interested because “the car was bloody good”. 

One of the initial Prodrive 550s was taken to Fiorano in November ’01 as the prospective deal moved forward. Kox and Ferrari F1 test driver Luca Badoer drove the car on the hallowed asphalt of Ferrari’s test facility. Within days, however, a Ferrari spokesman told Autosport that “there will never be an official racing programme with the 550”. Speculation at the time that the big boss of Ferrari, Luca di Montezemolo, had put the kibosh on the idea was absolutely true. He took against the idea of a Ferrari racing car built in Banbury. 

The ‘British Ferrari’ went on to do rather well all told. Its tally of race victories in FIA GTs alone stretched to 21, all but the first two won by Prodrive’s customers. There was a pair of titles and victory at the Spa enduro blue riband round of the series for Scuderia Italia. Like all the other 550 customers, it leased the cars from an entity known as Care Racing Development set up by Dor.  

Kox, Enge and Davies celebrate Prodrive's first class win at Le Mans in 2003

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The failure to forge an official link-up with Ferrari “kind of threw us into the arms of Aston Martin”, recalls Richards. “I’d always lusted after doing something with Aston Martin because I’ve been an Aston fan all my life. Every year, I used to knock on their door going all the way back to the days of Victor Gauntlett [Aston’s owner before it was sold in stages to Ford at the end of the 1980s].”

Richards’s ambitions to do something with Aston resulted in a Prodrive sportscar that predated the 550 Maranello, though one that never made it into the heat of competition. The organisation had in the mid-1990s built a one-off Aston Martin DB7 racer that could potentially have ended up as a GT2 car or more likely the basis of a one-make series. The project didn’t get much beyond some promotional testing at Goodwood with race legend Stirling Moss, complete with his cork helmet, among the drivers.

Richard’s overtures to Aston Martin coincided with an approach from the British manufacturer in Dor’s direction. It had plans to enter the GT arena with a carbon-chassis supercar designed by Graham Humphrys, who was responsible for the 1999 Le Mans-winning BMW V12 LMR, known as AMS-1. The hurdle it had to overcome was a lack of interest from Ford. That explained why the manufacturer came to Dor: it wanted him to help fund a run of 25 road cars necessary to allow the car to race. He wasn’t convinced that it was the right thing to do. But he told Aston boss Ulrich Bez that if Aston had something akin to the 550, he’d more than happily get involved. He was then taken to see a prototype of the still secret DB9. 

“I told Aston that the DB9 was the car to go with,” says Richards. “Uli insisted that they didn’t have the cash to do it. I said, ‘I’ll tell you what, if we fund the development of the car and promise to go to Le Mans, could we have the commercial rights for racing at Aston Martin for the next five years? To my surprise he said yes. The contract was quite flimsy as I remember. It was a bit of a back of a fag packet job.”

Prodrive followed the same business model as it had with the Ferrari, so once again there was no fat cheque. Revenue would be derived from the sale of cars and spares.

But the programme, recalls Howard-Chappell, who left Prodrive in 2011 but is now back in the Aston fold as a key player in the Valkyrie Le Mans Hypercar programme, “a breath of fresh air. We had to reverse-engineer the Ferrari; it was what I would call a ‘workshop’ car. But we could ring up Aston and say we needed drawings of this or that when we developed the DBR9.”

The DBR9 made a flying start to its career in 2005, a mix and match campaign centred on Le Mans. First off, it claimed GT1 class honours at the Sebring 12 Hours ALMS round and next time out in FIA GTs at Silverstone took a first outright victory. Prodrive was confident that it could prevail over arch-rival Corvette Racing and its Chevrolets at Le Mans after a test programme that included a 24-hour test — cut into three eight-hour chunks — on a circuit it created at RAF Elvington in Yorkshire. “We were able to put the speeds and loads into the car that you couldn’t do at somewhere like Paul Ricard using the long runway and the taxi ways,” recalls Howard-Chappell, who left Prodrive in 2011 but is now back in the Aston fold running the Valkyrie Le Mans Hypercar programme. The DBR9 had a performance advantage over the Corvette C6.Rs on its maiden attempt on Le Mans, but a fuel system issue and a broken radiator did for the chances of the two Astons late in the race. 

Back-to-back GT1 wins certified the successful partnership between Prodrive and Aston Martin

Photo by: Jeff Bloxham / Motorsport Images

Aston would have to wait until 2007 for a first GT1 victory at Le Mans, the first of back-to-back triumphs over the Chevys, the first in British Racing Green, the second in the emotive colours of Gulf Oil. A foray into the LMP1 prototype ranks was the natural next step. It yielded a fourth overall at Le Mans in 2009 with a highly-modified Lola powered by the DBR9’s V12. There were also a couple of victories in the Le Mans Series with a car officially known as the DBR1/2. The Lola-Aston coupe led on to a bespoke Aston Martin LMP1 developed by Prodrive, the AMR-One of 2011. The project was a disaster: the two cars managed six laps between them at Le Mans. 

“When you make mistakes you’ve got to make sure you take away lessons,” says Richards. “The lessons were that we didn’t have enough money or time to do the job properly. Sometimes these things bring you back to earth. We regenerated our GT programme, really focused on that, as a result of what happened in LMP1. I think that’s where we and Aston Martin should be.” 

AMR entered the reborn World Endurance Championship in GTE Pro for 2012 with the Vantage GTE, a development of a car that had first raced as the Vantage GT2 in 2008. The first-generation Vantage took a pair Le Mans class victories, one each in Pro and Am, the follow-up car one in Pro and two in Am. 

"Sometimes if I want to cheer myself up, I go into my mancave where I have lots of photographs and memorabilia to watch the last few minutes of that race [in 2017] for fun" Dave Richards

The 2012 season was an important one in the Prodrive/Aston story, not just for its WEC entry. It was also the year of the arrival of a second-generation GT3. The V12 Vantage GT3 quickly became one of the benchmark GT3 racers of its era. A quartet of British GT Championship titles were testament to a user-friendly car loved by the amateur driver. Nearly 50 were built. That tally has already been surpassed by the current generation of the Vantage, the car that carries Prodrive’s hopes in LMGT3 at Le Mans this weekend with a pair of entries under The Heart of Racing banner. 

Prodrive is going for a ninth Le Mans class win, though whatever happens as the clock counts down on Sunday afternoon will unlikely surpass the drama of its 2017 GTE Pro victory with the Vantage shared by Jonny Adam, Darren Turner and Daniel Serra. Adam took the lead, from a Corvette of course, starting the penultimate lap. It’s the Prodrive Le Mans win that Richards counts as his favourite.

“It has to be 2017 for me,” he says. “Sometimes if I want to cheer myself up, I go into my mancave where I have lots of photographs and memorabilia to watch the last few minutes of that race for fun. I just love seeing the expressions on people’s faces in the garage after Jonny takes the lead.”

The 2017 win stands out for Ricards across Prodrive's history at Le Mans

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images