People

Brian Dickie

Having grown up on the mean streets of Glasgow in Scotland, Dickie moved south to study business at the Harrow College of Technology in the northern suburbs of London. When he graduated in 1973 he applied for a management trainee position with the British Leyland car company, which by then was the country's only major car producer. For the next 15 years Dickie worked with BL, rising through the ranks of the company - which was nationalized in 1975 - to become a supply director of one of the BL divisions.

In 1987 Dickie moved to Rolls Royce Motor Cars, a division of the Vickers arms and engineering group. When Sir Colin Chandler was appointed managing director of Vickers and set about restructuring the various companies under the Vickers umbrella, Brian played an important role in the restructuring at Rolls Royce, which led up to the launch of the successful Bentley Continental. In 1993 Dickie was promoted to be head of the Rolls Royce specialist engine division and after that spent a couple of years in the business units of Rolls Royce.

In 1996 he was appointed managing director of Cosworth Racing, replacing Dick Scammell. At the time Cosworth was under pressure to produce better results and Dickie pushed the engineers to take bigger risks in order to be more competitive. This resulted in the Ford V10s suffering an embarrassing series of failures but by the end of the 1997 season Cosworth engineers reckoned that they had found around 100 horsepower, a remarkable rate of development. The new Ford V10 in 1998 addressed many of the problems and Volkswagen then decided to buy Cosworth from Vickers, as part of the deal to acquire Rolls-Royce. Cosworth Racing was then sold on to the Ford Motor Company and Dickie was replaced.