A wave equation with functional delay is considered. The problem is discretized. Constructions of the difference method with weights with piecewise linear interpolation are given. A basic method with weights with piecewise cubic interpolation is constructed. The order of the residual is studied without interpolation of the basic method, and the expansion coefficients of the residual with respect to time-steps and space-steps are written out. It is proved that the weighted method with piecewise cubic interpolation converges with order 2 in the energy norm. An equation is written for the main term of the asymptotic expansion of the global error of the basic method. Under certain assumptions, the validity of the application of the Richardson extrapolation procedure is substantiated, and the corresponding numerical method is constructed, that has the fourth order of convergence with respect to time-steps and space-steps. The validity of Runge's formulas for practical estimation of the error is proved. The results of numerical experiments on a test example are presented.