Poor old Dave Richards. The former rally co-driver has had a heck of a time recently.

After plugging away at the World Rally Championship for years he failed to take it to anything close to the commercial success of Formula One and offloaded the business onto production company North One last year. Then he announced that his long-held dream of launching a new F1 team had bitten the dust due to a lack of an engine and chassis partner. Now, courtesy of a report in the Independent written by Pitpass contributors Christian Sylt and Caroline Reid, it has come to light that Richards' rally company Prodrive has been on a rocky road. However, it is one which could finally see its F1 campaign realised.

Prodrive runs the Subaru rally team which has won six World Rally Championships taking its first title back in 1995. The business also makes limited edition cars for manufacturers such as Ford and Mazda. However, falling vehicle sales drove the company into a £7.5 million after-tax loss in 2006, down from a £2.8 million profit the previous year. F1 has also had a big part to play in this.

Richards was ousted as boss of the then BAR Honda team at the end of 2004 but Prodrive retained management of the team until the end of 2005. Losing this lucrative contract added to Prodrive's financial woes in 2006 and its turnover tumbled by £7 million to £104 million. However, perhaps the most significant development was that shareholder funds fell by 50% to just £8 million.

Until recently Prodrive was 56% owned by private equity firm Apax, which bought its stake for an estimated £35 million in 1999. Even back then, Prodrive was reportedly looking at getting into F1, either by buying backmarkers Minardi or Arrows or even Benetton, which Richards himself ran. However, that came to nothing and just one month after Prodrive announced last November that it wouldn't be on the F1 grid this year, Apax offloaded its stake in the business.

Apax transferred its shares for an unknown sum to Richards who now owns around 90% of the business and has a white knight waiting in the wings. This is the Kuwaiti Investment Dar Company (IDC), which bought luxury marque Aston Martin for £479 million last year in a deal spearheaded by Richards, who became the Bondmobile's non-executive chairman. Documents shown to Sylt and Reid reveal that IDC has the option of buying a 20% to 40% stake in Prodrive from Richards.

Buying into Prodrive could give the company the financial support to back an F1 team on its own two feet. The F1-mad Middle Eastern countries are already swamping the sport and Kuwait is one of the few countries in the region which isn't represented. With Prodrive owning a small stake in Aston Martin and IDC having the majority it would put the British marque on pole position to be the name of the team.

"In five years Formula One could be realistic for Aston," Richards said last year, and the pieces of the financial puzzle may now be in place to make this happen. And as for Richards' recent woes, with his net worth estimated to be £72 million, he's probably not losing too much sleep.