Time to hit the road, Jacques

"It's getting on my nerves," Villeneuve snapped at the European Grand Prix 10 days ago. "It's easy for Richards to talk like this. He has been at the team for only six months. I have been here for four years fighting to try to improve the team.

"I wonder what the team would have been like if I had not signed up in 1999. It is unfair Richards putting me in this position.

"I have always worked hard. A contract is a contract. If I moved from the team it would be to go with a winning team like Ferrari or Williams. But there are no vacancies, so there is no decision to take." Richards, a wheeler-dealer whose personal fortune is put at £55m, was not exactly cowed.

Amid the recent chatter about financial hard times in Formula One, he made a general call for the sport to reassess its priorities. But it scarcely required genius to spot a specific subtext. "In F1 you're so surrounded by excess and artificiality, it's all too easy to get lost in it, to start thinking this is what it's all about," he said pointedly. "A lot of people seem to have become oblivious to reality."

So who is the big cheese preparedto take on Villeneuve? Few who do not follow motorsport are familiar with Richards. He may look like a Billingsgate fish porter but he is a technological visionary, and gets on famously with the Japanese powerbrokers at Honda who share his enlightened management ideas.

Prodrive, the Banbury firm he founded in 1984 to design vehicle technology and run rally teams, has been hailed as one of the 100 best to work for in the country. There Richards is master of a loyal management team built up over the years.

Such wealth and power are a far cry from his Welsh roots. He spent five years training to be an accountant after leaving school, and subsequently was co-driver to Ari Vatanen when the Finn won the World Rally Championship in 1981.

Then Prodrive made Richards such a force that he became known as "the Bernie Ecclestone of rallying". The company developed the Subaru rally cars which won five world titles in seven seasons and last year made Richard Burns the first Englishman to become world champion. In 1999 he sold a stake in Prodrive to Apax Partners in a deal which valued the company at £150m. Richards's stake is about onethird of that.

Two years ago he led a consortium which paid more than £30m to Ecclestone for the media rights to world rallying until 2010. After a swift bidding war his firm, International Sportsworld Communicators, tied up a deal with Channel 4 to give the championship its highest-ever profile this year. Cheeses don't come much bigger than Richards.

But his decision to join BAR earned him new enemies. Richards insists he has "not deserted rallying". But Andrew Cowan, the team principal at Mitsubishi, accused "DR" of betraying the sport.

"We put a lot of trust in the guy," Cowan said. "It is too soon to lose him. Rallying needs him to complete the final chapter of its development. I am very disappointed."

Richards seems to be coping. He has cut 15 per cent of the BAR workforce - 52 personnel, including engineering director Malcolm Ostler and chief designer Andy Green. He is not afraid to let Villeneuve know what's what.

He is a very visible presence in the grand prix paddock, friendly and ebullient, cultivating contacts. He excels at the Formula One skill of a word planted here and there, said with charm and wit, designed to let it be known that he is not to be messed with.

"Dave is a guy you want on your side," said one paddock observer. "Don't be deceived by the big bright smile. Those are razor sharp teeth."