It would be fair to say that Ford Performance Racing has, to date, been a disappointment, although you’d be hard pushed to get that admission out of the Englishman who founded parent company Prodrive many moons ago.

The Oxfordshire-based motorsport engineering organisation has taken on some of the biggest challenges in motorsport, and won. The Prodrive website claims six World Rally Championships and five British Touring Car Championships, and it also runs the Aston Martin Sportscar program.

FPR is, perhaps, Prodrive’s least successful venture in recent times. Now into its third year, it has one lucky win from its second outing and a couple of Bathurst podiums to show for one of the biggest budgets in the sport. Having been relieved of control of BAR at the start of this year for political reasons, Richards has spent extra time in Australia trying to sort out his floundering and far-flung motorsport arm.

The signs of improved competitiveness are there if you look deep enough. Jason Bright has missed only one shootout this season, Greg Ritter has had some flashes that show he’s got what many of us think he has and the cars have basically been reliable. The problem this year has been running two cars that are fundamentally different to each other, operating as two single-car teams if you like...

The cure to that ill is only weeks away now, and with some of the changes ‘back at base’ it may yet be that FPR can stand up and take its place alongside SBR and Triple 8 as the premium-level Ford teams.

Andrew Clarke sat down with Richards at Queensland Raceway to see what he really thinks.

V8X: It seems like to me that FPR has been chasing itself for a long time. You moved premises last year, got the new car on board late this year and you’re still struggling...

DR: I think that would be a fair comment up until the start of this year. When I came out here in February, we were in a situation where, to the outside world, it might look like everything stagnated for a while, but the reality is that a lot of very solid foundations have been put in place by lot of people who really didn’t have a clue, in my opinion, what they were doing. We started to put some people in there that really understood the business and we stabilised things... things that should’ve been done three years ago and never were and now we’ve got the people to do it and all the proper engineering practices were put in place, all the right disciplines are there back at base. I’ve always felt this was the next stage, if you like, of the process.

How tough is it personally for you to do a staff clean-out?

Not tough really. People are involved and it’s not a task that I relish, but if you’ve given people the right opportunity and they haven’t been able to come up with the goods and do it, then I’m afraid the interests of the whole are far more important than that of an individual.

Are you sick of talking about potential for the team?

Well, that’s what motor racing’s about, getting the most out of a given quantity of assets, but things don’t happen overnight. Here in Australia it’s much the same as a Formula One Team. I remember the first year of FPR, it’s all sort of ‘what have you been doing with yourself for the past year’. I knew what we were doing and the people who were involved knew what they were doing, but it might not appear obvious to the outside world. It’s a bit like your next door neighbour going out and building a house. He tells you, ‘I’m well on it’ when all he’s done is brief the architect and got the plans done and got the planning permission, nothing’s been dug. You look over the hedge six months later and he’s still only got the foundations done, but without that being done properly nothing’s going to work in the long term.

So you think it’s liable to come with a rush once it starts?

It won’t come with a rush, that’s not how things work, really just methodical. If you look back and track everything, you will see that everything’s one year ahead of target in my view.

This year I think FPR’s performance has not really been noticed in the larger world, but there have been some great signs under the radar?.

I think that’s a very good observation, because if the outside world looks at it you think it’s much of a muchness; the same as it was before. Basically we’ve had speed, the reliability’s not bad – we’ve only had one failure at a race meetings – but we’ve been stuck mid-pack sometimes and that has hurt. So I think if you look at the underlying trend, it’s exactly what we would’ve hoped for.

So you’re pretty satisfied at this point?

I’m never satisfied, I’m always wanting more, I’m always pushing. Now is the time when it’d be too easy to become a little bit complacent because the guys have had to work their nuts off, quite frankly, and if I look back to what they’ve had to do over the past 12 months and some of them have had no holidays, and they’ve been working flat out. They’ve been working with the wrong equipment in terms of the cars haven’t been the right specification and things. By the time we get to Sandown we’ll have two cars, we’ll have all the parts we’ve sorted out. Back at base we will be better organised and all the program development will be worked out properly. It’s all too easy to become complacent at that point, but that’s the time you have to push like hell.

Is it hard losing both your drivers in one season?

That should never have been allowed to happen. You need continuity of people, you need continuity of your engineering staff and you need continuity with the drivers. To lose two drivers at the same time is a fundamental mistake.

Jason is obviously performing well with a bit of bad luck, Greg’s been a bit up and down, but you have to expect a little bit of that given where he’s come from this year.

Yes, to be fair to Greg, he has had a lot of the development work to do on the new car and the issues around that, he’s not as experienced as the other drivers around him, so all in all a bit of an up and down season. I think we’ve got to labour a bit longer to give him a fair chance. We’ve got to give it a little bit longer and see when he’s in a stable position.

Bathurst. In the middle of two rather ordinary years, you’ve done well at Bathurst. You’d obviously be looking to do it again this year?

I think Bathurst is an event on its own, isolated from the rest of the championship and looked at as an individual entity, and the second driver line-up is important to get right and look at the whole program around it. I would say that we’ve got reasonable reason to be confident when we go to Bathurst this year.

Last year you made the podium with a lot of pitstops.

They were pretty good pitstops. I think if you look at our guys now there’s been an awful lot of practice in the pitstops recently, and I suspect we’ll be even better in our pitstops this year than we have in the past.

If you’ve had an ordinary season and you win Bathurst, does it make it a really good season?

I think it redeems everything and I think if we look at the last few races of this year, I would hope that we’ll see some flashes of what’s to come.

As a Pom, do you understand what Bathurst means to Australians?

Yeah I do. It’s legendary even on the other side of the world, it’s up there with the likes of Le Mans as one of the big races in the world.

What’s happening with V8 Supercars at the moment? Do you think we’re heading in the right direction at the moment?

Personally, I’d be very cautious personally. I’m very wary of expanding something outside its natural boundaries; it’s interesting that NASCAR in the States has been very cautious not to do that. They know where their support is, they know where their lifeblood is... I would be preaching great caution in an extension of the V8s outside of its natural boundaries.

Cost containment, are we heading in the right direction?

I think people talk about cost control, but you’ll never control costs because the cost is about what people are willing to pay and what people are willing to pay to add value and so that will never change. So as the value of the championship increases – the size of the TV audience, the number of people that come to watch the races and the perception of the value of participating – that will determine the budgets available to everybody. The critical thing from there is that money just doesn’t buy performance, and that’s what you have to manage. You just have to try and make it a level playing field in that respect. I must admit the sentiment is very much there, and I think in general terms it’s been successful. I’ve seen some of the proposals for the future and I think some of them are very sound, but inevitably some of them are a little narrow in their thinking, but if we go into it cautiously and don’t do radical changes we’ll be OK. When you have a successful formula like the V8 series here in Australia, what you need to do is make the changes in very small steps, everything should just inch forward

Do you think that can be done without an overseas expansion?

I think they’re separate issues. What I’m meaning is the technical evolution of the sport, everyone’s sort of saying let’s keep the costs down, well I’m sorry, that will not happen, that will not happen so long as the value of competing continues to rise. If there are still teams who are on modest budgets today who think that everyone should back down to that level, then they’re deluding themselves I’m afraid.

What do you rate as a modest budget?

I don’t know the overall scale of budgets but it seems to me that you should be able to do this series very competently for eight or nine million dollars.

Can we maintain that, though? Could you end up getting 16 teams in pit lane with ten million bucks?

You’ll never have that, that’s not what life’s about. Some teams who’ve had a long history of successful series will possibly drop by the wayside and other teams will come to the fore as people get the right drivers on board, get the right engineering support and the right level of enthusiasm and support for their team. That’s the nature of life really.

How have you enjoyed your year with so much time in Australia?

I’ve had great fun. This is been one of the fun years of my life actually. Some years you look back and you think, that was hard work, it was tough. It was challenging and it can still be fun as well, but the last three years of my life have sort of been like a bit like being in a war and this year has been a time when I’ve spent more time with the family, albeit we’ve been travelling a lot and doing lots of things together, but it’s also given me a chance to spend real quality time with people who I think are important. This series out here in Australia is important to me, and I’ve enjoyed spending time with the team here.