ASTON MARTIN'S GREATEST RACING ERA?
One page of A4 paper. That’s all the original deal between Aston Martin and Prodrive stretched to back in 2004. It hardly seemed the stuff of a successful and enduring partnership, but that’s what it has turned out to be. Six class wins at the Le Mans 24 Hours and nine World Endurance Championship titles are among those successes, and that’s not to mention the 323 racing Astons built over the past 17 and a bit years.
“That contract was written on a single sheet of paper between myself and Uli Bez [CEO at Aston at the time],” recalls Prodrive founder David Richards. “It said, ‘We’ll do this and you’ll do that.’ It was nothing more than that. That’s how it all kicked off.”
As simple as it may sound, the story behind Aston’s return to motorsport for the first time since a single season with the Group C AMR1 in the World Sports-Prototype Championship in 1989 was a drawn-out affair. There had been more than one proclamation from the company about its desire to mount a comeback during the 1990s, and Prodrive had been keen to lead it. It even built a racing DB7 GT concept racer, which was tested by Andy Wallace and none other than Sir Stirling Moss, in the mid-1990s in its efforts to lure the marque back. “I’ve had Astons for years and am an avid fan,” says Richards. “I used to see them on an annual basis and say, ‘Isn’t it about time you went racing?’”
The turning point in the tale was the arrival of Bez as Aston CEO in the summer of 2000. He made his ambitions clear to take the marque back into motorsport to his new head of product development, Jeremy Main, when he moved over from the parent company in 2002.
“When I interviewed with Uli Bez, motorsport was part of the discussion,” recalls Main. “He asked me if I wanted to be
