Having been rejected both due to a lack of experience and thanks to his former employment at McLaren during the early 1970s – and unsure as to which scenario was worse – John Barnard was sour as he sought a third bite at the cherry.

Seriously cheesed off at a lack of recognition for his groundbreaking ground- effect Champ Car, drawn up in his dad’s Wembley front room before it evolved into Johnny Rutherford’s 1980 Indianapolis 500 and Champ Car victor, Barnard did not want his Next Big Thing to be claimed by others or compromised by committee.

Thirtysomething and ambitious, he sought total authority on the technical front and equal billing elsewhere. So, he aligned instead with an ambitious junior formulae team boss, an ex-Formula 1 mechanic one year his junior, called Ron Dennis.

“I joined Project Four at the end of 1979 and started designing my first F1 car,” says Barnard. “Ron couldn’t get the budget to finish it, but John Hogan of Marlboro was very interested, and also very disappointed with how McLaren was going; it was he who would stitch the teams together.

“We upped their game. Everything that got made and done, how the car was put together, came from the drawing office – and I ran the drawing office. That put a lot of backs up. But McLaren had fallen off the technical bandwagon.”

With their sharp eye for detail and far-sighted view of the bigger picture, Barnard’s design – the ‘carbon’ McLaren Marlboro Project 4/1 of 1981 – and practices, in conjunction with Dennis’s structures and systems, would become templates for F1’s mid-term future. In the shorter term, Dennis’s breezy confidence would have to whip and stoke Barnard’s fire within.

“F1 was aflame: Jean-Marie Balestre’s FISA versus Bernie Ecclestone’s FOCA”

F1, meanwhile, was aflame: Jean-Marie Balestre’s FISA versus Bernie Ecclestone’s FOCA; grandees versus garagisti; atmo versus turbo; English skirting of French rules lost in translation; Niki Lauda and more strident drivers; and TV rights for whatever was left standing. The first Concorde Agreement of 1981 just about kept a lid on things while a sometimes brattish Britpack scrabbled for more (horse)power: ‘Mr E’ with BMW; ‘Chunky’ Chapman and ‘Uncle Ken’ Tyrrell with Renault; and Frank Williams bonding with Honda. Tetchy relationships. Sketchy times.

Barnard reckons he got just 10 days’ notice for the rule change that would end the ground-effect era. And it was already November 1982. Three years’ work – with another scheduled – flushed down the tunnels in favour of flat-bottomed swirls without skirts. Gee, thanks.

And hadn’t he got the gig of total authority, plus his perfect turbo engine, because his former bosses had sucked at ground effect? Breezy confidence: Project Four. Breath of fresh air: McLaren International, end of 1980. Barricades stormed: the ‘Kings of Woking’, end of ’82. New broom. But now, kaboom! Shockwaves felt as ‘far afield’ as Chessington, home of Brabham. “I was worse off than most because Bernie was, shall we say, guiding the rules, and so I thought I had the inside line,” says the ostensibly more laidback Gordon Murray. “He kept saying: ‘Forget the rumours. We are keeping skirts.’

“I had the opposite philosophy to John Barnard. At Brabham, we always built our cars during the latter part of the season for the following year, then tested for about three weeks, usually in November, and thrashed the thing. BT51 – a small-tank ‘pitstop’ car – was testing around August-September; plus, we had another two virtually built. I’d given myself so much time because also we were having to design and develop tyre warmers and high-pressure refuelling – they took almost as long as the design of the car itself! – as well as practice pitstops.

“Then: no skirts! Everything on BT51 – centres of gravity and pressure – was in the wrong place now. For the first time, I was absolutely on the back foot. With no time to do anything other than theorising. And that theory was a sketch: this is what’s going to happen. I dumped the sidepods and moved the centre of gravity rearwards by seven per cent. That’s huge, a gut-feel. We didn’t start until November, and it was absolutely day and night after that. There were probably only around 40 of us; the design staff was me and David North. We kept it clean and simple with very little adjustment. That was because of time constraints, but also because I knew the year was going to be all about turbo engine development.

“Ill fate, judgement and tempers stripped F1 of its veneer of innocence in 1982”

“I thought everybody would be doing the same. When we arrived in Rio, [in March 1983 for the season opener], I realised we were out on a limb. I felt confident still. I don’t know why. It was a big risk – even forgetting pitstops – to move that much weight around and turn up without testing. I wouldn’t have been that radical given a bit more time. We would have had short sidepods to generate some downforce.” This was the ‘mature’ tactical world in which nascent Marlboro McLaren International was attempting to operate as a strategic entity. It rejected accepted conventions, including folded aluminium tubs, and a turbocharged engine reckoned “good enough for Lotus”.

“Our thinking was that we could do better,” says Barnard – who had placed it on a collision course and under heavy scrutiny.McLaren had survived 1981 – witness John Watson’s crash at Monza’s second Lesmo and team-mate Andrea de ‘Crasheris’ having incidents at many other places. Despite still sharing power with the old guard, it provided a relative oasis of calm resolve during 1982, as ill fate, judgement and tempers stripped F1 of its veneer of innocence: the deaths of slighted, angry Gilles Villeneuve and poor, unsighted Riccardo Paletti; rules openly flouted and ‘in the spirit’ airily touted; Lauda’s red-and-white ‘Kyalami army’ and ‘Me or Imola’ teams both out on strike. How was a man supposed to think, especially when the dark year led to regulation changes to improve safety? And yet.

“Everything about the design, manufacture and construction of MP4 was of a magnitude I’d never seen before,” says Watson, who had joined McLaren from Brabham in 1979. “Accuracy; repeatability; and none of the inconsistencies of the old methods. John virtually had carte blanche and went to America to get the technology. His uprights and the like were thus lighter, stronger and shedloads more expensive.”

That, however, was before 1984’s proposed regulations had been brought forward 12 months. The clocks were striking 13, as George Orwell once wrote.

“Having picked myself up off the floor,” says Barnard of his sudden ground effect ban design dilemma for 1983. “The first thing I did was go back to the wind tunnel models; having separate body panels gave us greater flexibility aerodynamically: delta-wing cars; long, thin cars; all sorts. Basically, I took areas from a couple, put them together and came up with the ‘Coke bottle’ shape. That proved quite effective at recovering some of the downforce lost and set a trend.

“Had I known, I would have changed the turbo engine’s specification [to better suit a flat-bottomed car], but I had underestimated the value of a purpose-built unit. Ours was a fully stressed member. Compact, too. Factors that allowed me to do aero that others couldn’t.

“Nobody else but Dennis would have tried to sign Senna alongside Prost, never mind make it happen”

“Ron gave us the ability to do all that stuff – the [bespoke] TAG-Porsche turbo; a wind tunnel with a rolling road that gave usa better understanding than our rivals – because he did the deals that Teddy couldn’t.” Dennis had also put in the cold call to Stuttgart that [former outright McLaren boss] Mayer was cool on.

Not that Barnard had his ‘perfect’ engine yet. For a man reputedly running a short fuse, he favoured the slow burn: an immaculate conception; a long gestation; newborn preparedness. Design long and hard; build late and decisively – unless railroaded by a driver with clout.

An impatient Lauda – another unlikely deal pulled off spectacularly by Dennis – went directly to Marlboro to shout the odds: “‘Listen, if this turbo car does not start in 1983, you’re not going to win in ’84’. Ron and John were upset like you wouldn’t believe.” Barnard would later admit that important lessons were learned with the resultant troublesome MP4/1E hybrid that so offended his perfectionist sensibilities. “It was my decision to bring it early,” continued Lauda in To Hell and Back. “But the rest, the team did; Barnard did. The engine was perfect: horsepower, driveability. You needed a big rear wing which Barnard did not agree with in the beginning. But it was the best car.”

‘Coke Bottle’ MP4/2 won 12 of the 16 races in 1984 as the team romped to the constructors’ prize and Lauda pipped returning team-mate Alain Prost to the World Championship by a half-point. Yet Barnard was hardly turning cartwheels.

“Come August, when we knew we had the championship won, my brain turned to the next year: ‘Christ! I’ve got to do it all again’. By the end of 1984 – I’m not entirely sure why – I wanted to sell my shares [up to 43 per cent from the pre-takeover nine]. Ron and I had put our houses on the line to get the loan to do the deal. A big commitment. I was married and had two children and didn’t like taking financial chances. So Ron did a deal on my shares with Mansour Ojjeh of TAG.

“I found it very draining. As you move up, the pressure increases and the enjoyment decreases. But you shouldn’t go into F1 unless you have the character to say, ‘I’ve got to win. Take that next step. Move things on’.”