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David Richards - Part #2 - Road Cars
by Stefan Bartholomaeus
June 2008
Whilst Prodrive work with many different car makers on a vast array of engineering projects all over the world, they hold an interesting place in the Australian market. Their joint venture with Ford Australia - Ford Performance Vehicles – is well known, having been launched with the BA model Falcon in 2002.
Their involvement with Toyota’s new Toyota Racing Developments brand is less publicised however. An agreement was reached in July 2006 for Prodrive to operate Toyota’s new performance arm in Australia, and has since launched an Aurion derived model for the street, with a hotted up Hilux to follow.
It is somewhat curious then that Prodrive have no involvement in the TRD branded motorsport activities, which is made up of both gravel (Corolla) and tarmac (Aurion) rallying programmes. These are currently contracted to Neal Bates Motorsport. Richards’ response is firm. “We haven’t had any discussions with them [Toyota] to do with motorsport at all.”
Richards is equally stern when it comes to Prodrive’s position in the automotive world. The Prodrive P2 show car, launched in January 2006, sparked talk that Prodrive would one day become a maker on its own. Richards remains adamant that this isn’t the case.
“That is not our ambition. The bit we’re good at doing is working with the marketing teams of the manufacture to identify a niche product that is probably not economic to make on the main stream production lines or with a large manufacturing process, but, for 1000 units, 2000 units is quite viable, and there would be a market demand for it. You see it with FPV in this country, and also with the TRD model. We are doing a number of other products in Europe with a number of other car manufacturers as well. The engineering resource you require to do that is quite different to building a ground up car, and I’m not sort of naive enough to recognise that is not the case. I’ve seen so many people with ambitions way above their ability and sort of lose their shirts as the result of it. So we’ll stick with the knitting and know what we’re good at doing and focus in on that.”
So why do it? Why produce a one off car?
“It was designed for two purposes. It was designed, primarily for a reason perhaps not quite so obvious. It was designed to bond the people back at Bandbury, and back at Warwick, and all the Prodrive team, every part of the organisation had an involvement in that, and I wanted to show everyone what we could achieve as one organisations, focussed on one activity, and then it had the secondary role of promoting what we could do to the outside world."
Despite recent talk of the demise of the locally built Falcon product, Richards remains adamant that the FPV operation is a viable one. The suggestion by FPV chief Rod Barret that the company will be ‘finished’ if the Falcon dies, is quashed by Richards.
“I think that FPV has historically been associated with the Falcon, high performance versions of it, and most recently the Cobra, but you’ve also seen us produce a Territory recently, very successfully, and I would like to see FPV broaden it’s reach into a wider spread of Ford models, and I think there is a lot of rationale for that, and I hope that a lot of benefit can be seen by Ford for us to doing, involved in other products.
“I don’t rule out anything, and without getting into details of Ford’s product mix in the future, I see a logic for FPV to have an involvement across the range. FPV is the performance brand of Ford Motor Company here in Australia and New Zealand, and if there are going to be performance models of any range in that series, and model in the Ford range, then clearly we should look to have an involvement from FPV in that."
- Stefan Bartholomaeus
© 321 IGNITION Pty Ltd 2008
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