The Motor Sport interview: John Barnard

John Barnard is one of motor sport’s most innovative and revolutionary engineers. He designed winning grand prix cars for McLaren, Ferrari and Benetton and brought ground-effects to the Chaparral 2K Indycar with which Johnny Rutherford won the 1980 Indy 500.

Joining McLaren in 1972 he worked with Gordon Coppuck on the championship-winning M23 before moving to America, creating innovative Indycars for Parnelli Jones. He then returned to Formula 1, having attracted the attention of Ron Dennis at Project Four where he began work on the revolutionary MP4 for 1981, the first F1 car to run a carbon-fibre chassis, an innovation that hugely improved rigidity and driver safety. He also designed its Coke-bottle shaped sidepods, an innovation much copied by other teams.

In 1987 he moved to Ferrari, not at Maranello, but working from his own base in the UK. By ’89, he’d introduced the electronic semi-automatic gearbox, allowing drivers to change gears without taking a hand off the wheel. The designer documents his career in more detail in Nick Skeens’ 2018 biography The Perfect Car – written with Barnard’s co-operation. Ross Brawn has described him as “game-changing in his influence and involvement in F1”.

Motor Sport: Do you regret leaving McLaren in 1986? You surely could have continued to produce race-winning cars for them?

JB: The truth is, yes, I probably do, but what I really regret is selling my shares in the team because the power dynamic changed when Ron still had 40% and I now had none. My decision to leave built up over time. Part of the deal was that I stayed for another two years. John Hogan from Marlboro had said I should be earning more money. I spoke to Ron about it but he never came back to me on that. Then Ferrari started waving big cheques at me, adding noughts all the time. I was the first to re-set the bar, if you like, for what designers or engineers were paid at that time.

I needed time to go away and think. I’d done three years with the MP4 in various guises and I wanted to do something new. I think Ron assumed I’d always be there with him but I decided to make the move and went to Ferrari. Ron was furious with me and he told Enzo Ferrari that if I took people away from McLaren he’d look at taking people from Maranello.

“Lewis isn’t as quick as Leclerc, but he’s still a decent driver”

Incidentally, on the subject of Ferrari, I’m interested to see what happens when Lewis Hamilton goes there. I don’t think he’s as quick as Charles Leclerc, but he’s still a decent racing driver, and he understands how to win championships – not by winning every race but by consistently scoring points. I wonder, too, what happens if the car doesn’t suit him because at Ferrari it doesn’t take long for them to turn on you.

It’s hard to explain but the Italian media puts pressure on the team, week in week out, and that’s tough to deal with. At the Motor Sport centenary dinner I spoke to Adrian Newey and I said to him, “You’re not going to Ferrari,” and as we now know, he decided it wasn’t for him.

Enzo was still alive when you went to Ferrari. You refused to live in Italy for family reasons but did you spend time with him?

JB: Yes, I’d made it clear I’d only take the job if I could be based in England. I wasn’t taking my family to Italy, and they agreed to that. Importantly, I needed to be in complete control of production because their carbon-fibre facilities were not up to the standard I expected or wanted and they didn’t even have a decent wind tunnel.

I told [then-team principal] Marco Piccinini that things had to change, they needed to get serious, so he stopped the Italian sitdown lunches in the paddock and then blamed it all on me when the newspapers ran stories with headlines like Barnard stops the Ferrari lunches. I mean they just had to get more organised – at McLaren we’d have sandwiches while we worked between practice and qualifying.

Enzo was the one who’d hired me, so I went to see him and he was still going strong right up to the end. He would demand that dyno charts and graphs from every engine in the engine shop be put on his desk. He’d look at them and say this engine goes to this driver, that one goes to Alboreto, or whoever it was, this one has two more horsepower, that kind of thing, you know.

One of your best-known innovations was the semi-automatic electronic gearbox. What led you to this idea for the Ferrari 640 in 1989?

JB: I wanted to do something new and different after the MP4 and I’d started playing around with keeping all the radiator flow inside the body and exit at the rear wing. The Ferrari 640 started the trend of internal radiator flow, and it had a totally new torsion bar set-up at the front. Giorgio Piola [F1 technical artist] told me he’d drawn that so many times but didn’t understand how it worked until he saw one of the torsion bars on a mechanic’s bench and finally saw how it all worked. The problem with internal airflow was the manual gearshift, the bulge for the gearlever, and getting all the linkage through the car, past the engine, through the suspension, and this compromised the chassis space.

“Schumacher’s way of driving was go-kart style, different from Prost”

I thought, “Now that we have electronic valves for active suspension, why can’t we use those and have buttons on the steering wheel with cables going to the back of the car?” It was a challenge for the drivers because, to begin with, we didn’t have proper control of the engine revs so they’d have to pick the shift points on down-changes precisely. It was a huge learning curve for them until computer technologies allowed us to perfect it and then they had all the advantages, both hands on the wheel while shifting through corners, and they could no longer over-rev the engine.

For me it solved all my packaging problems at the rear of the car. After Enzo’s death the new management from Fiat weren’t keen to continue with the automatic gearbox. They said they thought it would be unreliable, but when Nigel Mansell came in 1989 he drove the manual car at Fiorano and immediately told me he wanted the paddles back on the steering wheel. He then won his first race for Ferrari in Brazil in March, becoming the first driver to win a grand grix in a car with a semi-automatic gearbox. This, of course, is a long story cut short and the whole process was much longer and more complex. These days the electronics are so fast they can sense when there’s a gap in the dogs, on the dog rings, and gears shift just on the gap. We’re talking about milliseconds, the systems are so good.

You worked with some great drivers – Alain Prost, for example. What made him stand out from the rest?

JB: He was one of the best there’s ever been, no question. At McLaren he could always outqualify Niki Lauda and Niki wanted to know how he did that, what he was doing with the car. He was a magic tyre reader, knew when and how to push the tyres, when it was a tyre problem and not a chassis problem. He had that magic feel for those things. The good guys don’t have to think about how to be quick, they have so much reserve capacity for gathering information, and he was one of the very best.

Feedback was so important when there was no telemetry. It all came from discussions with the driver, and Prost would always point you in the right direction. That was hugely valuable.

Was Michael Schumacher the same – able to identify problems and communicate clearly what he needed?

JB: I only worked with Schumacher in 1996 but at the first test at Estoril I could see that he had his own way of doing things. We had the 1995 car there, with a V12 engine, and he said he could have won his world championship the previous year a lot more easily with this car. We also had the V10 engine at that test. He drove that as well, and said he preferred the V12. I was surprised, so asked him why, and he explained that he didn’t have the engine braking he had with the V12, and he used that in the corners, so we went from a six-speed gearbox to a seven-speed. His way of driving was go-kart style, very different from Prost. He’d dive into the corners, control the rear on the throttle, on and off the power – that style requires lightning reactions, and for him that worked. He didn’t have Prost’s ability to isolate problems. He would describe what he needed in more general terms, but of course he was super-quick, and brave, a bit like Mansell.

Interestingly, Wattie [John Watson] would be very clear about what he wanted. He always told me, “Give me a back end that I can rely on, that gives me traction, so I can open the throttle out of the corners.” This was tricky to get right in qualifying but in the race he was always bloody quick. So it’s really impossible to set up the car for two different drivers. If it’s set up for one, it won’t be as good for the other. Maybe that’s an element of what’s going on with Sergio Pérez at Red Bull where Max Verstappen wants a front end nailed to the track, a bit like Schumacher.

Looking at your career it seems that Benetton was a glitch. You didn’t have the notable success that you’d had with McLaren and Ferrari. Is that fair?

JB: Yes, it is. I’d left Ferrari and I told Flavio Briatore what I thought the team needed in terms of budget and facilities, and started work on the B190. I told them they needed to get rid of the big tea-tray front wings they’d been running, which made no sense to me. The car would step sideways in the corners. It was all over the place.

“Wherever I went people expected me to move them up the grid”

Rory Byrne had started designing the B190 and I was setting up my own design office in Godalming where we had a proper composite facility that Benetton didn’t have at the time and nor did they have a proper wind tunnel so we had to get that up and running. My biggest regret is what Rory Byrne and all the Benetton guys learnt from what I was doing, and it soon became clear to me that they didn’t want to work with me, but my job was to fix the problems, not to make everyone feel super-comfortable.

I had started work on the B191 but my contract had still not been signed and I went to see Luciano Benetton because Briatore wasn’t getting it sorted. It was a horrible situation and in the end Briatore told me there’d been a board meeting and they wanted me to go. Again, this is to cut a long story short but I felt they hadn’t honoured my contract and I was no longer prepared to toe the line.

To précis the other parts of your career, you went back to Ferrari where Luca di Montezemolo was now in charge, you went on to work with Arrows, and then did time with Alain Prost’s new F1 team with the Peugeot engine until it was disbanded. You also did some consultancy at Toyota when they were first considering Formula 1.

JB: It was difficult for me to step back and join a lesser team than I’d been used to. Wherever I went people expected me to move the team up the grid, and we did do that at Arrows – Damon [Hill] so nearly won the Hungarian Grand Prix in 1997 – but every time you join a new team your name is on the line and it’s the same today when a leading designer or engineer changes teams. I had bought back the factory set-up I had created for Ferrari so I was now running B3 Technologies commercially and we were busy.

How did you satisfy your creative drive once you’d left the Formula 1 paddock? 

JB: I got involved with a leading furniture designer, Terence Woodgate. He came to B3 and I introduced him to carbon composites. We did a carbon table which did very well, got lots of accolades in that world, and I still get involved in the design of furniture with Terence. He is a minimalist type of guy, but I’m not so into the aesthetics. I like more detail. I do the engineering side of it and he comes up with the aesthetics and this keeps me in the composite world.

For the last six years my wife and I have been kept busy designing and building a new house. I’ve drawn bits of it and got very involved in the project. When I left Formula 1 we moved to Switzerland and built a new house there too. We’re back now to be close to the family but these things have kept me busy enough. Looking back, I get some pleasure from knowing that I contributed all those ideas and designs that changed the way Formula 1 cars were made.