Prodrive is a British motorsport and advanced engineering group based in Banbury, Oxfordshire, England. It designs, constructs and races cars for companies and teams such as Aston Martin, Bahrain Raid Xtreme and Team X44. Its advanced technology division applies this motorsport engineering approach to deliver engineering solutions into automotive OEMs, aerospace, defence, marine and other sectors, which now represents more than half its turnover. Prodrive also has a specialist composite division based in Milton Keynes where it manufactures lightweight carbon composite CFRP and visual carbon components for many supercars and increasingly for the luxury automotive, aerospace and marine sectors. Prodrive first became well known for its involvement in the World Rally Championship with the Subaru World Rally Team, developing championship-winning cars for Colin McRae, Richard Burns and Petter Solberg, which now reside in the Prodrive heritage collection alongside many other of its classic race and rally cars at its new Banbury headquarters. While the Subaru World Rally programme ended in 2008, today its motorsport manufacturer programmes include Aston Martin Racing in the FIA World Endurance Championship, Bahrain Raid Xtreme in the Dakar and World Rally-Raid Championship and Team X44 of Lewis Hamilton in Extreme E. The company employs nearly 500 in the UK at operations in Banbury and Milton Keynes. History Prodrive was founded in 1983 by Ian Parry and David Richards, the latter is now the chairman of the group. Originally the company was known as David Richards Autosport before becoming Prodrive in the late 1980s. Their first involvement in motorsport was with the Rothmans Porsche Rally Team, running a Porsche 911 SC RS for Henri Toivonen at the European Rally Championship and for Saeed Al Hajri in the Middle East Rally Championship. In 1986, Prodrive ran a MG Metro 6R4 in British and Irish rally championships. In 1987, they expanded into touring cars, running BMW M3 in the British Touring Car Championship. They were the outright 1988 champions, and class B champions in 1989 and 1990. There were plans for a works entry with Mercedes during 1993 and into 1994, with Bernd Schneider slated to drive, but plans were shelved. Since then, Prodrive has run touring car programmes for Alfa Romeo (1995) for Honda (1997-8), for Ford (1999-2000 BTCC champions in 2000) and with Volvo in 2002 in the FIA European Touring Car Championship (ETCC). In 1990, Prodrive started rallying with Subaru, a relationship which lasted until December