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David Richards - Looking Forward
by Stefan Bartholomaeus
pic: Sean Henshelwood
June 2008
David Richards commands an enormous amount of respect in the motorsport world. As co-founder and now chairman of the highly successful Prodrive engineering company, Richards overseas the Aston Martin GT, Subaru WRC and Ford Performance Racing V8Supercar programmes. On top of this, the Englishman is the commercial rights holder for the World Rally Championship, and in March 2007, led a consortium that bought the Aston Martin road car business from Ford. Here then, is a busy man.
When the FIA recently floated the idea of introducing a budget capping system for Formula 1, Prodrive Chairman David Richards was one of its strongest knockers. The Englishman claimed that it was unworkable, and merely an excuse for poor technical regulations. After having seen a very similar concept, dubbed the “Total Racing Expenditure Cap”, introduced and then quickly abandoned in V8Supercar racing, his criticism was perhaps not altogether surprising. Indeed, as a man who trained as an accountant, and is heavily involved in both the engineering and promotional sides of world motorsport, there are few better qualified to speak on matters concerning cost control.
“I still believe what I said, that I think that it’s flawed, and a cap on expenditure should be achieved by the technical regulations” he states. “The role of a legislative body in motorsport, is to try and minimise the benefit that those with large budgets have over those with the smaller budgets, who might be technically as competent, or maybe in some cases more competent. So what you’re trying to do is to make sure that the pure expenditure of money does not influence performance on the track, and the other variables are the bigger influence, i.e. the input of the drivers, the way the team operates on the track, and just the general efficiency of the organisations. That’s the roles of governing bodies. It’s not easy, and it’s a very very difficult thing to do in such a complex business as motorsport, but that is the challenge for organisers of championships around the world, and that goes for Formula 1 as much as it goes for V8 Supercars.”
Although, as professional championships, Formula 1 and V8 Supercars can be looked at together in this instance, Richards is quick to point out that it is not the same for all motorsport. The restrictiveness of the regulations should be different, depending on who is competing, and more importantly, who is watching....
“What you have to do is look at what the purpose of a championship is at all times, you have to look at whose it being run for........and there’s a big disparity in what you do at one end of the spectrum to the other end of the spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, when you’re grass roots level of motorsport, is participant activity, and when you’re at the other end of the spectrum, whether its V8Supercars or Formula 1 or any other international formula, you are there for the audience, and you’re there to provide a show for the audience and a platform for your sponsors, whether they are car manufacturers etc....
“Everyone starts at grass roots level, and everyone involved at grass roots level wants the ability to show their expertise, and show that they can build a better engine than the next person, and bolt a car together differently to get that performance advantage, and at that level of sport, there should be the ability to show the talent and engineers and the people who have got creativity around them can do that. But once you get to the other end of the sport, that is actually negative, and that actually does not serve the purpose that you’re there for, because the crowd out there do not care if all the engines in all the cars were identical. What is the benefit, to the crowd in the grandstands and the TV audience? In fact, it’s quite the opposite, if they are all equal, it would be better for the people there.”
Whilst few would argue that professional sports – of any kind - don’t have to make sure that they are entertaining, motorsport is inherently more complex. Internal competition between the teams themselves is important. Motorsport will, to an extent, always be a technical challenge as well as a purely sporting one. Furthermore, to the hardcore fans, motorsport is about engineers, mechanics and technology as well as driver ability. Surely these fans shouldn’t be ignored?
“Obviously, there is a balance to be had,” he continues. “I’m not for one minute suggesting it’s easy, and I’m not for a minute suggesting we just have one make championships all over the world. But you have to narrow it down, so that the performance gap is so relatively small, that other factors, the sporting factors, can influence. The better driver in the poorer car can still win a race. The better team work in the pit lane can still win a race. Those are the influences that you should be helping to create, and when you achieve that, then you stop the inordinate expenditure on minutia, because when the minutia of a wind tunnel effect on a F1 car means that that wins or loses you a race, that means you spend millions and millions and millions on your wind tunnel work. When it becomes irrelevant, and it is actually better that the team is organised better, and that you have the best pit stop crew, or you have the better driver, the shift of emphasis takes place, and that to me is more healthy for the sport.
“Now, all it does, and don’t get me wrong, is move money around. All it does is move money into different places, it doesn’t change the overall amount of money you are going to spend, because the overall amount of money you are going to spend is purely determined by the value you create and nothing less. And so, that just means that the drivers might be paid more, the chief mechanics might be paid more, the pit crew might be paid more. So the money might just be in different places, but I think it will create a far more sporting environment that is far more unpredictable, and that’s what people want in sport, they do not want predictable motorsport where the same drivers win weekend after weekend.”
It is evident then just why Richards is so against the salary cap concept. Even if it could be enforced in a fair and legitimate way, which itself is highly debateable, it still couldn’t ensure a ‘show’ in the same way that restrictive technical regulations can, because it will still fail to ‘shift the emphasis’. Whilst such changes to the regulations may be the better solution, according to Richards, introducing them with full paddock approval wouldn’t be that simple...
“One of the problems we face is that many of the people in motorsport come up through the engineering background. Some of the biggest influences in the sport are from the engineering side, and I suspect more so here in the V8 championship than anywhere else, where team managers and team owners come from that background. But I’d ask them to put that to one side and think about that show first of all.”
Moving the conversation back to Formula One, Richards is keen to point out that the team management situation there is very different. The last ten years has seen an influx of car manufacturer owned teams, at the expense of the traditional, private entries. This only complicates matters further. Whilst the car manufacturers seek publicity to build their brands, they also seek an engineering challenge, and to be able to ‘pioneer’ new technologies for the road. Considering the size of the investment that these manufacturers are making in the sport, they naturally are keen to have a significant voice in the sport’s direction and future. According to Richards, this isn’t the way to go.
“When the whole paddock is full of people who are from corporate background and just used to running large corporate organisations, I don’t think that’s healthy either. This is a show, and the people like Bernie Eccelstone, and Tony Cochrane understand that. You know, we all like to be influences of our own destiny, and team principles in V8Supercars are no different from anyone else, but at the end of the day, we are here to create a show.”
But just how did Richards come to understand the importance of creating a ‘show’?
“I think I’ve been around long enough and I’ve sort of, you know, old enough and ugly enough to have seen it all happen before now. I think you just quietly build up in your own mind what’s right and what’s wrong, and sometimes you have to stand back from things and think for yourself. I drum this into all the people at Prodrive. Yes, we are passionate about our success and us doing well, but we’re a motor racing organisation, whether its in V8s down here, GT with Aston Martin, World Rally Championship, whatever category we’re in, and therefore the success of the show, the success of the sport, is paramount to me, because if that is successful, we will [as a company], consequently be successful.”
So whilst in many categories, Richards speaks from the position of a competitor (through Prodrive), in the WRC, it is different. He is the Ecclestone, he is the Cochrane, he is the man that must promote ‘the show’. However, the nature of rallying makes it a more difficult task. Unlike F1 or V8Supercar, it isn’t a discipline of the sport that can be broadcast live in a two hour time slot, or played out in front of a main grandstand.
“We are not able to communicate it [the WRC] properly, and that is the sad fact today, and it is an issue that we still have to wrestle with. It still is a real challenge to communicate and get that right in the World Rally Championship. (It’s ) probably because we are more and more used to package products, to be able to sit in a grandstand here in Adelaide and eat our popcorn and drink our Coca Cola and have it right in front of us.”
It is evident that the issues explored here aren’t ones taken lightly by the Prodrive Chairman. In order to survive and prosper, professional motorsport needs to be produced as a show that will appeal to the public. This is clear. Whether the respective governing bodies decide to do this through expenditure caps or restrictive technical regulations will be vital to the sport’s future. With salary caps and outlandishly open ‘energy recovery system’ regulations currently the talk of the F1 paddock, it is perhaps not a coincidence that Richards has decided against entering the pinnacle form of the sport just yet....
- Stefan Bartholomaeus
© 321 IGNITION Pty Ltd 2008
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