Outstanding in the shadows

One of racing’s great achievers, Bob Bell has never courted the limelight. Now a consultant to Manor GP, he has a unique distinction: he played a key role in the cars that dominated the final phase of F1’s first turbo era and the dawn of its second
Photographer: Stuart Collins

Formula 1’s first turbo era was brought to a close by McLaren’s dominant MP4/4 in 1988, when Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost between them won all but one race. Last year, the Mercedes W05 dominated the inaugural season of the hybrid turbo formula almost as surely, Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg between them beaten just three times. Two cars, a total of 35 races – and they won 31 of them. One man was instrumental in the creation of both, an unheralded, softly spoken Belfast engineer who has neatly sidestepped the spotlight for more than three decades in the sport: Bob Bell. He was the aerodynamicist in charge of the MP4/4 and the technical director at Mercedes as the W05 was conceived.

He’d already been at McLaren six years, recruited by John Barnard direct from Queen’s University Belfast with a doctorate in aeronautics engineering, as the MP4/4 did its first test on the eve of the season – at Imola, where it was almost 2sec clear of the field.

“Ron [Dennis] called me into his office,” he says, “which was always ominous. He told me he’d just heard from the track team that the car was immediately more than 1sec a lap quicker than everything else. Even then it didn’t really sink in. I just thought, ‘Wow, it cools, it hasn’t gone off and it’s a second a lap quicker. At least I’m OK for another few months.’ It was a sense of relief – and only later pride.”

It’s significant that Bob was at the factory rather than the track as the car was making its first run. Always happier within the nitty-gritty than the glamour, he’s an enabler, someone who makes sure things happen, are done in the right way within the required timeframe. The perfectionist within him and the great way he has with people make him brilliantly suited to this task. The ego-massaging high-profile roles he’s happy to leave to someone else. These are traits that would come to determine the trajectory of his career, as a very effective and much coveted manager of engineering groups – especially so as the size of F1 teams grew exponentially in the late 1990s/early 2000s. Back in 1988, even McLaren numbered only about 100 people, about a tenth of the number involved in creating the Mercedes W05 26 years later. At McLaren in 1988, Bell was the only aerodynamicist in the whole company!

“Developing the W05 was all about managing a very large group of people, making sure they had the resources and knew what the direction, priorities and targets were. Teams go into such intimate detail now on the smallest things because that’s where the gains are. Getting one per cent more out of each of a lot of people adds up to an awful lot more than getting 10 per cent more out of yourself. So I put all my energy and focus into making sure that the W05 represented the best of the collective effort between Brackley on the chassis side and Brixworth on the engine.

“In the ’80s we didn’t have finite element analysis for working out structures on the car; most of the composite and metallic design was done by rule of thumb and empirical method. We had no CFD to help with the aerodynamics; we ran a very modest and mediocre aero programme five days a week, eight hours a day, all very laid back. That was at the National Maritime Institute tunnel in Teddington. I did the aero design, drew the wind tunnel model bits, oversaw the wind tunnel tests. But I was also head of R&D so was doing material development, structural development, drawing bits when there were just not enough people to draw them to get them out of the door. I was trying to get McLaren’s first CAD-CAM system introduced. When I first went there in ’82 they didn’t have a technical computer. They had a computer sitting in the accounts office that ran the payroll, but there wasn’t a single technical computer and I remember [commercial boss] Ekram Sami and I spending a day at an IT trade show trying to convince some vendor to give us a couple of small PCs to do some technical stuff. It felt very different to today, because you were doing loads of different stuff – none of it very well. I was deeply involved in a hands-on way.”

While Bell handled the aerodynamics, Steve Nichols was in charge of overall design and Neil Oatley worked on the ’89 car. In overall technical charge was Gordon Murray, newly recruited from Brabham by Ron Dennis. “Gordon pushed for the laid-back seating position he’d already tried on one of his Brabhams [the BT55 of 1986]. That was his main direct contribution to the car, which was otherwise Steve’s work. Gordon was nominally put above Steve and Neil, while as the aerodynamicist I was junior to them.”

By the time Bell became technical director at Mercedes, recruited by Ross Brawn in 2012, he would be overseeing a staff of hundreds. Bell assumed some of the technical control relinquished by Brawn as Ross concentrated on his team principal role. Bob recruited in turn Geoff Willis and Aldo Costa. It was a high-calibre collection of individuals, each of them having served as technical directors elsewhere – but, as Bell sees it, such a group was absolutely necessary given the task in hand at the time, and goes a long way towards explaining Mercedes’ current dominance.

“I think the other teams really missed a trick at that stage,” Bell says. “There was so much to do. When I came in we were working on the then-current 2012 car, the 2013 V8 car and the 2014 hybrid. On top of all that we were in the midst of exhaust blowing – which was a huge area of development requiring a very close liaison between the chassis and engine groups. There was such a lot going on and the formula change was of such a magnitude that we felt it was a real game-changer – and that we had to get it right. Because if we did, we could potentially enjoy that advantage for a considerable period. Geoff set off to do the early architectural work on the 2014 car, principally aero studies. Aldo looked after development of the existing cars, then as we approached 2014 it became time to do detail design work, so Aldo moved into that while Geoff moved on to look at how the car would be run and operated, which was much more involved than before. I acted as the overseer for those two strands of work and made sure that what the chassis group was doing gelled with what the engine group at Brixworth was doing under Andy Cowell. There was a lot going on and we just dealt with it better for the long term because we started earlier and dedicated resources to making it happen.”

Pushed on what the MP4/4 and W05 projects had in common to account for their success, Bell cites four factors: “They were both great examples of a genuine team effort. The people involved approached it as a common task and there was no clash of egos. Steve, Neil and I really gelled on a personal level and it was a similar thing at Mercedes between me, Geoff, Aldo and Andy Cowell.

“Secondly, we had fantastic – though very different – leadership in Ron and Ross respectively. Ron’s vision changed the scale of F1. He saw the way the sport was growing through what Bernie was doing and used that to generate much bigger sums of money for the team. He understood you had to have a big chunk of the organisation just out there finding money. He scaled it right up year on year and it took the others a long time to catch up. He was very good at getting the best drivers, had a way of convincing them that McLaren was the place to be, a way of instilling loyalty. Ross was a very different sort of boss to Ron. He’d started out as an apprentice machinist and could do everything. He was completely unruffled, objective and calm but tough. He almost relished a fuss, particularly a legal fight and just rose above everyone else. When you were in a difficult situation, you were confident that the captain at the helm was going to rescue the day. You only really noticed his presence when there was an issue to be resolved: the bigger the issue the bigger his presence. Some people tend to be shy and disappear into the background when a dark cloud appears over the horizon, but Ross walks with you to face it – and that gave you a great deal of confidence. I deeply admired him and learned a lot from him about how to treat people and lead people.

“Thirdly, both cars had undoubtedly the best engines of their day. Honda led the way in ’88 – though Lotus had that engine at its disposal too – just as Mercedes produced the best power unit in 2014.

“Fourthly, perhaps the competition just did a poor job on both occasions. That can happen, and in each of these cases I think it did.”

He might have made a fifth point – that both teams were rather well served by driving talent. “I saw far less of Ayrton and Alain than I did Lewis and Nico. Because I was based at the factory, the only time I really saw the McLaren drivers was when I ran a couple of tests. The animosity between them wasn’t really apparent on the surface and they were very professional. Ayrton was much more proactive than Alain and gave the impression of being more in control of the group of people around him, plus his relationship with Honda was much closer. When you were with Ayrton you definitely had the feeling that this bloke was something special. I got a similar feeling with Schumacher at Mercedes, but I didn’t get it with anyone else. Nico and Lewis are very fast, very talented and incredibly strong technically. If you brought Senna back and put him in Lewis’s car, Lewis would probably beat him. Maybe if you put Lewis in Senna’s car Senna would beat him. The sport has evolved, become much more technical. You now need a much deeper understanding of the technology behind the cars so it’s difficult to draw comparisons.”

Bell and everyone else who worked on the W05 project cite the incredibly tight co-operation between the chassis and engine sides of the equation in the conception of the car – and that’s not a claim that could really be made of McLaren and Honda in the late ’80s. “Obviously, they were two different entities – unlike at Mercedes. When he was at McLaren a few years earlier John Barnard had been a pioneer of integrating engine and chassis – and he had been on Porsche’s case in making the TAG engine to his dimensional specifications. But with Honda, we did our thing, Honda did its own. It came together and we went racing. There was not the same level of unity, but it worked out OK. Osamu Goto was the Honda guy assigned to the project – a very good engineer, very westernised and a good link between the two organisations.

“At Mercedes Andy Cowell’s great strength was that as a club racer himself he understood that it’s about getting a complete car across the line in the shortest time. We are not racing dynos or wind tunnels. He would make sure there was a common rate of exchange between the engine and chassis guys that would allow numerate, dispassionate decisions about what was best and he challenged everyone on that.”

This fed into the whole car, as can be attested by the fact that the engine’s unique front-mounted compressor – an intrinsic part of the W05’s aero advantage – arose from a question originating in the chassis group.

There’s one more contrast in the circumstances behind the creation of each car: those central to the MP4/4’s creation had yet to make their reputations – the car itself did that for them – whereas those behind the W05 had long served in senior positions. “When John Barnard had left McLaren at the end of ’86, there was an immediate sense of relief. John was a brilliant engineer but a real dictator. He was a hard man to work for. As soon as he went, Steve took charge and rallied the troops and we made real progress in solving some of the issues on the car at that time. There was a relief palpable through the whole organisation that you now had breathing space and a sense of freedom. Steve kept us all pointing in the right direction but in a very unobtrusive way. California Dreamer was his nickname but he’s a very clever guy. So we all felt a bit disappointed when Ron brought Gordon in. We were all thinking, ‘We don’t need a replacement for John, we can do this ourselves.’ But Ron was seeing a bigger picture. I’m sure sponsors were tapping him on the shoulder, asking what he was going to do about replacing his star designer.

But at the time it felt like an intrusion. It wasn’t ever completely comfortable between Gordon and Steve, but it was workable and they respected each other. Gordon gave Steve the latitude to do the car the way he wanted and Gordon was more of a bridge between the technical and commercial side.

“Gordon brought with him David North, the transmission specialist, and he was a revelation – and made the Weismann three-shaft gearbox on the car work.” This gearbox – made possible by the reduced crankshaft height of the Honda motor, in turn made possible by a smaller, tougher clutch – was an essential element of the design, allowing Bell to sweep up the underfloor for increased ground effect. “We worked hard to minimise the volume of everything so we maximised the space I had to play with aerodynamically. It was an evolution of the ’87 car, still with the classic McLaren coke-bottle bodywork in plan view – an Alan Jenkins invention and one that has stood the test of time. The mechanical guys would develop the chassis while in parallel I came up with a set of wings, bodywork and radiator duct layout that fitted around that. Nowadays it’s still parallel but the aero guys now have more say up front, starting earlier, defining the chassis shape – and the mechanical guys will run along behind trying to make it fit. Back then we didn’t have the people or time to do it like that.”

A visual comparison of the two cars reflects the times; the McLaren’s clean-drawn simple lines classically elegant, the Mercedes (regulated to be 10 per cent narrower) with all the surface fussiness that comes from computerised optimisation loops and the intricate regulations that have tried to limit downforce. Yet with similar power-to-weight ratios, on the remaining roughly comparable tracks, the newer car is between 10 and 11sec per lap faster while using about 30 per cent less fuel. It also took about 10 times as much money to create.

Bell knows very well the passion, sacrifice and talent represented by both cars. “Being involved in one wasn’t more joyous than the other, just different. The McLaren experience was more intimate of course, but the Mercedes one was just as satisfying. But I do think F1 needs to look at somehow applying a budget cap and slackening off the technical rules. It would be wonderful and truly what F1 should be about.”