Not your every day car meet!
Owners of AMR and GT8 model Aston Martins were invited to a tour of Prodrive. We at Petrolheads Welcome were able to tag along and bag a few photos…
The Story:
Founder, David Richards, upon concluding his own very successful rally career, wanted to move into management and so set up Prodrive. Initially focused on preparing and running rally cars, this expanded into endurance racing cars and now world class innovative technologies for the globe’s leading automotive manufacturers.
Prodrive’s relationship with Aston Martin began when David Richards approached Aston Martin, then owned by Ford, to persuade them to commence endurance racing again with the launch of the DB9 back in 2003. Ford weren’t keen so Prodrive purchased a car and built it into a world-beating endurance racer, the DBR9.
From there, David Richards sold shares in Prodrive to fund acquiring Aston Martin from Ford. He then became Chairman of Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd. The rest, as they say, is history.
In 2017, an Aston Martin team operated by Prodrive, once again won Le Mans with the V8 Vantage. That association continues today as Prodrive runs the AMR (new generation) Vantage race team.
We were lucky enough to see these cars being prepared alongside customer GT3 and GT4 cars at their amazing facility in Banbury, Oxfordshire.
AMR Team Principle, Ben Sayers (right), although preparing the cars for the next race meeting at Spa, found twenty very valuable (to us) minutes to explain what goes into the preparation and the key differences in the various classes of car.
Whilst we can’t go into details here, you can imagine that nothing is left to chance and every element is rehearsed to perfection!
We wish Prodive and AMR success in this year’s WEC race series.
Read here about our trip to the 2018 WEC race at Silverstone.
