We have one of the special kind of senior developers with his own style of programming and work-life balance that is part of the project leadership setting the direction of the project.
Our colleague is hard-working and gained the trust of the client and management. His code works but no one makes any critical look on it.

The person is rather hard to work with. When it comes to programming he's always fast and dirty. Comments like "iterate through the objects" before a loop, his own unique naming of things and some bad practices like semicolons for Python. His code looks like write-only.

He finishes always first with his tasks, fast and dirty - management likes that.

The bigger problem is I have to use his code. We don't have any time for refactoring and it's hard to suggest anything to people above you. Arguing with the management's favorite developer is shooting yourself in the feet.

I'm experienced developer but not a team lead or manager.

What is a good approach to improve my position?

* Ignore the situation and do my best. I have the feeling problems are coming for me, not doing things that fast and dirty.
* Do everything fast and dirty as well, bend to the project and colleague style.

**Edit**:
I'm more experienced in some areas(python in the case) and have higher expectations in the coding style. Yes, the code works, but it's horrible.

We are consulting company and writing like this creates the stereotypes like "People from X country are incompetent and write horrible code".