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It's 30 years since David Richards formed Prodrive. Jesse Crosse drives two of the British motorsport outfit's most celebrated icons from the title wins that have followed
We're at a remote track in the Staffordshire countryside with Prodrive technical director David Lapworth, rally mechanic 'Stretch' and Prodrive PR man Ben Sayer. It's an informal occasion, just two box trailers carrying two rally cars, and a lot of Prodrive fans, all here to celebrate 30 years of Prodrive, the company formed in 1984 by David Richards (right) and Ian Parry from a small consultancy business which has since gone on to become one of the most successful independent motorsport teams of all time.
The cars they have brought along represent two separate decades in Prodrive's timeline, but both are genuine icons - and they're letting me drive them. The first is one of the E30 M3s which Prodrive built and ran for the BMW Rally team from 1987 to 1990. This car won the 1990 French Rally Championship in the hands of François Chatriot.
The second, from the 1990s, is Colin McRae's Group A Subaru Impreza, the car in which the flying Scotsman won Rallye Catalunya and the last of the Group A cars before new World Rally Car regulations came into force in 1997.
These are two radically different machines. The rear-wheel-drive BMW was in its element on asphalt events but struggled on gravel, while McRae's four-wheel-drive Impreza was good on, well, just about anything. The BMW engine is a full-house screamer, producing just under 300bhp (exact figures aren't recorded) and revving to 9000rpm. The Subaru's warbling, 320bhp boxer engine revs easily to 8000rpm - although it sounds like it's only doing around half that - and it easily reaches the...