Prodrive Racing assessing Tickford branding
Prodrive Racing Australia could bring the Tickford Racing brand back to Supercars, with team boss Tim Edwards not ruling out a branding partnership between the race operation and the road car business.
Tickford Ranger
Tickford
Edwards and PRA co-owner Rod Nash recently revived the Tickford brand in Australia, with a line of customisation packs for the Ford Ranger and Mustang models.
While the racing operation and the road car enhancement business are effectively seperate, there was the first signs of a commercial tie-up between the two at Bathurst, most notably the Tickford signage on the steering column of Mark Winterbottom’s Prodrive Ford and on the front guards of Cam Waters’s car.
Given Edwards and Nash’s involvement across both businesses, and given that PRA has maintained its commitment to Ford even after the manufacturer pulled all funding from Supercars, one potential outcome could be the return of the Tickford Racing name to the sport.
“I’ll have to have that conversation with myself,” joked Edwards when asked by Motorsport.com.
“Who knows where we go. You can see there is Tickford signage on the cars [at Bathurst], so… who knows?
“They are two separate business, totally separate. Rod and myself are obviously across both businesses, but [Tickford] has got its own finance department, its own purchasing, all of that.
“Time will tell where we take that. At this point in time it’s Prodrive Racing Australia and Tickford.”
The Tickford brand was used by Ford on its customised performance cars between the early 1990s and the early 2000s, while Glen Seton’s factory-backed Supercars squad ran under Ford Tickford Racing banner between 1999 and 2001.
The Tickford branding was then scrapped for Ford Performance Vehicles, a joint venture between the English-based Prodrive outfit and Ford, in 2002. At the same time the then Prodrive-owned race team was rebranded to Ford Performance Racing.
The Prodrive Racing Australia name came as part of Nash and Rusty French’s purchase of the FPR team from Prodrive at the end of 2012, and was put into use at the start of 2015 after Ford had withdrawn its funding.
On the road car side, Edwards and Nash had some of their new Tickford machinery on display at Bathurst last weekend, with a Tickford-tweaked Mustang and a fully customised Ranger both on show.
“We want to sell personalisation packs to people. And you can draw the connection that we race Fords, so that’s the natural link,” Edwards added.
“For us, we’re in the fortunate position where the donor product, as in the Ranger and the Mustang, is some of the best stuff on the market. Being able to enhance something that is already bloody good is good for us.”
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