KEY POINTS:
David Richards liked the product so much he bought the company. Yesterday, a consortium led by the former world rally driver and motorsport enthusiast took control of Aston Martin, paying Ford Motor Company £479 million ($1.3 billion) for what remains one of the best-known motoring brands in the world.
Although Richards - DR to his colleagues - will become non-executive chairman of Aston Martin, its legions of admiring fans should not run away with the idea that the marque is finally back under British control after a break of more than 30 years.
The money to finance the deal has come from two Kuwaiti investment funds which will, between them, own a majority stake in Aston Martin, adding it to a stable of British trophy assets that includes the Grosvenor House hotel on London's Park Lane.
But the deal was warmly welcomed by Aston Martin drivers and trade unions as providing an owner seemingly happy to respect the tradition of the brand and invest in its future.
Kuwait's Investment Dar and Adeem Investment funds have more than US$5 billion (nearly $7.2 billion) of assets under management between them. The other member of the consortium, Texas banker and Aston Martin enthusiast John Sinders, is not short of a buck either.
The Richards consortium is at least Aston Martin's sixth owner in a chequered history stretching back nearly a century - it was founded and named in 1914 by Lionel Martin.
But perhaps its most famous owner was tractor manufacturer David Brown, who bought it in 1947 and gave his initials to some of the most famous Aston Martins to grace the roads, including the DB5 driven by Sean Connery in the 1964 James Bond movie Goldfinger.
Brown sold in 1972 and the brand drifted into the wilderness until it was revived in the early 1980s by Victor Gauntlett, who bought it with the backing of a Greek shipping family. He sold to Ford in 1987.
Richards - who drives a £177,000 ($490,000) Aston Martin Vanquish, a "brute" of a car - is all too aware of the company's sometimes inglorious past.
He recounts the tale of how an American enthusiast came to the UK in the 1970s to buy a couple of cars. But the company was in receivership, and the doors of its factory in Newport Pagnell were closed and padlocked.
The story goes that he persuaded the receivers to re-open the production line to fulfil his order before the doors were locked again.
Thirty years on, Aston Martin is thriving once more, making an operating profit of about £40 million a year. It is producing more cars than at any time in its history - its new state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Gaydon, Warwickshire, is running at virtually full capacity and made more than 7000 cars last year.
Today's models range from the V8 Vantage to the DB9, and are about to be joined by the DBS, the car driven by Daniel Craig in the latest Bond movie, Casino Royale.
After that will come the Rapide, a four-door concept car shown just over a year ago at the Detroit Motor Show. Last year, Aston Martin was voted the coolest brand in Britain by the Superbrands organisation.
Yet Richards believes this is only just the start.
"Aston Martin has gone from being a cottage industry to a major global player in the past decade, but I believe its true potential is yet to come," he says.
"It is not my intention to be a token chairman. My intention is to be actively involved in the future of this company."
He perhaps would say that, having invested a significant, though undisclosed, chunk of his personal fortune in the company.
But Richards also has a track record that demands he be taken seriously. He left professional rallying in 1981, ending his career by co-driving Ari Vatanen to the World Rally Championship that year.
Three years later, he formed the motorsport company Prodrive, which today employs more than 1000 people worldwide. Prodrive has won six world rally titles with Subaru and five British touring car championships with BMW, Alfa Romeo and Ford.
In 1999, Richards sold a 49 per cent stake in the business to the private equity firm Apax Partners to help pay for growth plans.
As well, Richards has run Grand Prix teams for Benetton and BAR Honda, qualified as an entrant for next year's Formula One championship and taken Aston Martin back into the world sports car series.
How he came to own the car company he cherished as a customer for so long was down to a matter of chance.
A few years ago, he bumped into fellow consortium member John Sinders and the two exchanged business cards.
Neither thought any more about their meeting until Ford announced in August last year that it had decided to explore its "strategic options" with regard to Aston Martin - biz-speak for putting the business up for sale.
A few weeks later, Sinders picked up the telephone and arranged to meet Richards for dinner in Stratford-upon-Avon. Although the banker's speciality was shipping, he said that if he could round up a group of investors willing to buy Aston Martin, would Richards agree to front the bid?
The rest, as they say, is history. Along the way, the Richards consortium has seen off a pack of rival bidders, including Australia's James Packer, Syrian property tycoon Simon Halabi and the private equity group Doughty Hanson, which is thought to have offered Ford about £400 million.
If Ford is happy with the price it got, the buyers are certainly pleased with their acquisition.
Aston Martin's German chief executive Ulrich Bez, who joined in 2000 and has overseen its turnaround, has agreed to stay for five more years.
He is buzzing with ideas to expand the brand from its traditional markets in Britain, Europe and the US into Asia and Eastern Europe and make it the world's top car marque, ahead of the likes of Ferrari and Bentley.
The first Aston Martin dealership in South Africa opened last year, another opened in Melbourne last week and one will open in Moscow in June.
Bez says that when the Rapide goes into production at a rate of up to 2000 a year, total output could get close to 10,000 cars a year.
Richards has assured his chief executive that the money to match his ambition will be forthcoming.
That will also be music to the ears of the brand's fan club.
Aston Martin Owners' Club chairman Michael Urban says: "It has been a worrying six months so today's announcement is a positive move. There seems to be a lot of money for investment and I think decisions will be made more quickly."
Might one of those decisions be for "DR" to follow David Brown's example and attach his initials to a future model?
"My ego doesn't stretch that far," says Richards. "This may be my passion, but at the end of the day it's a business."
- INDEPENDENT
