How One Man Defined Modern Formula 1 — and How it Left Him Behind
The Formula 1 that we know today, and the Formula 1 that I often write about are in many ways two very different beasts. As years have gone by, the sport has evolved on all fronts from the commercial to the technological, which means that only the vague description of “a top-level class of single seater, open wheeler motorsport” remains to connect the Formula 1 of today with the sport as it existed at its genesis.
This change in the very DNA of the sport has in many cases been brought about by rule changes or gradual evolution over time. In other cases though, change has happened suddenly as a result of a must-have innovation by one team or even one individual. I have even written about some of them already.
Among those figures is a man who contributed pivotal developments to Formula 1 which I would say are some of the defining features of the modern incarnation of the sport. During his tenure in F1 he also worked with some of the greatest figures Formula 1 has ever known, yet he also seemed to disappear from the forefront of F1 almost as quickly as he burst onto the scene.
That man is John Barnard, who designed cars for the likes of McLaren, Ferrari and Benetton, and who enabled figures such as Alain Prost, Niki Lauda and Michael Schumacher to fight for race wins and championships.
Barnard’s first dalliance with Formula 1 was a relatively brief one, but it showed his potential as a designer. In 1972 he joined McLaren after a stint with Lola Cars, where he helped chief designer Gordon Coppuck to create the M23 chassis that would go on to provide McLaren with its first world championship.
Barnard soon moved on however, and went to work in Indycar, where he really began to make a name for himself. In particular, it was his stint at the legendary Jim Hall’s Chapparal marque that allowed him to really show his talents, as he designed the ground effect Chapparal 2K chassis which dominated the 1980 Indycar season, including winning the Indy 500.
As the 2K was dominating Indycar though, Barnard himself was already gone. His ability had caught the eye of one Ron Dennis — a plucky Formula 2 team owner who was looking to make the step up to Formula 1.
Formula 2 was of little interest for Barnard, but a return to Formula 1 proved irresistible, as the ambitious young engineer harboured innovative ideas which he wished to demonstrate on the world stage.
Among these ideas was a concept for a fully carbon fibre Formula 1 car, which he had become convinced could work after being shown carbon fibre manufacturing techniques used by Rolls Royce for their cutting-edge RB211 aero engine. Barnard believed that the technology could allow for a lighter, safer and crucially stiffer F1 car — which was proving to be an especially key trait in the era of ground effect aerodynamics.
Barnard was able to persuade Dennis that a carbon fibre F1 chassis was a worthwhile investment, but initially was met with major roadblocks in getting his ambitious design off the ground.
Among these was the fact that every British company that Barnard approached insisted that a Formula 1 chassis was far too complex to build out of carbon fibre, and they therefore refused to do it. Barnard was at a loose end, until a fortuitous conversation with a newly-hired American engineer called Steve Nichols resurrected the project.
Nichols had previously worked at a US firm called Hercules Aerospace, which specialised in carbon fibre, and suggested that Barnard present the idea to them.
As it happened, Hercules were very enthusiastic about Barnard’s plan and the opportunity to push the boundaries it afforded, and quickly got to work on realising the concept.
In the meantime, Ron Dennis had secured his route to Formula 1, after convincing Marlboro to broker a merger of his old Formula 2 team and the McLaren Formula 1 team which Barnard had worked for eight years earlier, creating a revived ‘McLaren International’ team. This deal also secured the necessary funding for Barnard’s ambitious plan.
McLaren had been in the doldrums ever since ground effect aerodynamics had taken hold of Formula 1 in the late 1970s, but this merger presented an opportunity for rebirth. Barnard therefore found himself helming the technical team of the outfit he’d started his F1 career at, with his radical carbon fibre car as his first output as a chief designer.
Fortunately for Barnard, Hercules were able to realise his vision and present a full carbon-fibre monocoque F1 chassis for the first time ever. The completed car was christened the MP4 — named for its Marlboro backers and Dennis’ old Project Four team which he’d merged with McLaren.
Some trepidation was evident from McLaren at the start of the 1981 season, as the team opted not to actually race the sleek new car until the third round in Argentina, despite the fact that the MP4 had been available from the very first round. Instead the team cautiously opted to only run the car in practice initially, in the capable hands of McLaren driver John Watson.
The eventual debut for the MP4 would be a relatively anonymous one, with 11th on the grid for Watson and retirement in the Argentine race. The team didn’t lose hope however, and gradually tweaked the design, adding and removing experimental parts such as a somewhat ungainly full-span front wing in order to find performance.
By mid-season, the car was dialled in, and Watson went on a fearsome run of races.
First, he took a strong third in the hotly-contested seventh round at Jarama, trailing home only Jacques Laffite and a faultless Gilles Villeneuve who claimed victory that day.
The following race was better still. The French Grand Prix was held on the high speed, undulating Dijon circuit, and the MP4’s refined aerodynamics allowed Watson to qualify second only to the turbocharged Renault of Rene Arnoux.
On race day Watson repeated the result, despite the race being interrupted by a sudden rain shower which necessitated a red flag stoppage and the usage of aggregate times.
Then came one of two crowning moments for Barnard’s MP4 in its debut season, as Watson drove the state-of-the-art car to its first victory after an attacking drive on the very circuit where it had been launched just four months earlier.
That race is one which I have written about in detail before due to the impact it had on Watson’s career, but for Barnard it represented a vindication of his ambitious plan, and his contribution to McLaren’s rebirth as a competitive entity after a torrid few years.
Perhaps an even greater vindication came later in the season at Monza. In this case it was not an eye-catching result that showed the usefulness of a carbon fibre chassis though — quite the opposite in fact.
The race was a chaotic one, with both wet and dry spells causing chaos up and down the field. On the slippery circuit, Watson in the MP4 ran wide through one of the high speed Lesmo bends and lost the car on lap 23.
He spun out at some 170 miles per hour, and crashed backwards into the barriers. The car snapped in two, and a startling flash of flame went up as the fuel lines ruptured. It was the exact type of accident that had caused serious injury or even claimed lives in the fragile aluminium monocoque cars of the past, yet almost unbelievably, Watson simply stood up from his seat and walked away completely uninjured.
Some had cast doubt on the strength and rigidity of a purely carbon fibre chassis upon its debut (indeed Lotus, the other major team experimenting with carbon fibre at the time, had opted against a full carbon monocoque because they believed it would not be rigid enough) but a driver walking away from such an accident totally unharmed proved all of the doubters wrong.
While the MP4 won only one race in its debut year, and Watson finished only sixth in the championship, its impact was nonetheless seismic. Barnard had proven that a carbon fibre chassis could provide both a marked safety improvement, and also be competitive enough to win races, and had totally upended the status quo in F1 by doing so.
Every other team begun looking into developing their own carbon fibre chassis for these reasons, until the technology became totally ubiquitous in Formula 1. Indeed, Carbon Fibre remains the construction technique of choice in F1 to this day, with almost every major component being made out of the material.
Without John Barnard’s forward-thinking attitude, none of this would have been possible, and it is quite probable that several drivers would have lost their lives if not for the safety advantages of carbon fibre alone.
Barnard was far from done innovating though. He remained at McLaren and over the following seasons saw the likes of Niki Lauda drive his MP4 (updated to B specification) to two more victories, while Watson also claimed another pair. He was established by this point as a top F1 designer, but a championship still eluded him, and he still had more developments to bring to the sport.
The follow-up MP4/2 which Barnard designed for the 1984 season was to prove almost as significant a milestone as his original MP4 design.
For one, the car proved to be the most dominant machine in F1 history at the time, as the all-star driver line-up of Niki Lauda and McLaren returnee Alain Prost took the TAG-Posche turbo engine car to a record 12 wins from 16 races that season.
The usage of carbon fibre pioneered in 1981 was also taken to another level through the usage of carbon brakes, affording Prost and Lauda superior braking performance to their rivals. Others had tried the concept before, but it was Barnard and his team who made it work properly.
It wasn’t just the engine, brakes and drivers that made the MP4/2 so good though, as Barnard had worked his magic to make the car streets ahead of the competition aerodynamically too.
One of the most visible developments behind this aerodynamic advantage was Barnard and his team’s deployment of so-called “coke bottle” sidepods, which dramatically tapered inwards to direct air between the rear wheels and out of the rear diffuser — maximising its effectiveness. Such an idea had been dabbled with before — notably by Lotus on their abortive Type 80 chassis — but it was Barnard and McLaren who made the concept a winner.
With F1 having only recently banned ground effect in 1983, understanding of aerodynamics had seen something of a reset, with many teams throwing ideas at the wall to try to gain some downforce. As it turned out, sidepods of the type that Barnard and McLaren used proved to be a huge leap forward.
It didn’t take too long for other teams to catch on and copy the McLaren’s approach, as the car was so obviously superior to the opposition in essentially all aspects. Williams were the first to cotton on, introducing a B-specification of their clunky FW09 at the 1984 British Grand Prix.
This was soon followed by a flood of what some termed “Barnard conversions” that swapped cars over from the bulkier packaging seen at the start of the season to mirror the approach of McLaren.
Indeed, it could be argued that Barnard’s MP4/2 is one of the main driving factors behind the move away from the somewhat boxier car designs of the early 1980s towards the sleeker machines of the 1990s and onwards. The core “coke bottle” shape of the MP4/2 continues to be mirrored on modern F1 cars, even as the tightness of packaging has reached levels which would have been unimaginable back in 1984. It seems that Barnard could not help but implement ideas which would stand the test of time.
This was something he would prove with yet another ground-breaking development, but not before his MP4/2 and its variants took three driver’s and two constructor’s titles for McLaren, including a dramatic underdog title win for Alain Prost against Williams in 1986, who were using a more modern chassis with a superior engine by that time.
By the time Prost raised the trophy at the final round of the 1986 season though, Barnard had departed McLaren, having been lured away by an irresistible offer from Enzo Ferrari to design cars for the Scuderia. Barnard was even able to negotiate that he be allowed to remain in the UK to do his work as opposed to going to Maranello — showing the esteem which his work was held in by the F1 establishment at the time.
Ferrari were stuck in a bit of a rut in the mid-1980s. A hoped-for title in 1985 had evaporated after a strong season was squandered by bad reliability, and the team’s follow-up efforts had been hopeless.
Barnard eventually realised that something radical was needed to lift the team out of the doldrums, and he therefore proposed a suitably revolutionary design.
What Barnard proposed was a car designed around a semi-automatic gearbox, with gear changes being controlled from the steering wheel rather than the traditional lever. The theory behind this proposition was that its advantages would be threefold.
Firstly, the gearbox would allow for quicker and cleaner gearchanges than a human being could execute — indeed, and viewer of 1980s F1 will know that missed gearchanges were often a key factor in deciding a race, and could even result in retirement if sufficiently botched.
Secondly, the lack of need for the driver to take their hands of the wheel meant that they could focus more on steering, rather than having to drive certain sections one-handed as they snatched gears with the other.
The final benefit was perhaps the most important though, and showed a continuation of Barnard’s concern for packaging that had made the MP4/2 so dominant. Switching to a semi-automatic gearbox and removing the gear lever would allow the front of the car to be packaged much more tightly around the driver, and thereby allow for a more aerodynamic car than would otherwise be possible.
Some of these benefits such as the ability for faster changes had been considered before, and a semi-automatic gearbox had been mooted for F1 as far back as the late 1970s — not least by Ferrari themselves, who even tested such a system back in 1979 before abandoning it.
Once again it was Barnard who actually put the effort into developing the idea into something raceable though, as he fought the notoriously traditionalist Ferrari to convince them to put his ideas into practice. By 1988, after two seasons of underwhelming results and the death of the company’s founder Enzo Ferrari, Barnard was finally able to get them to accede and give him the green light.
The result was the Ferrari 640, which has often been described as one of the prettiest Formula 1 cars of all time. Every part of the car was unusually sleek for the period — not least the slightly cramped cockpit, which of course was sans-gear lever, and instead featured paddles on the back of the wheel for shifting, after a proposal for simple buttons fell flat — a minute detail which still had a lasting influence on modern F1 cars.
As might’ve been expected of an innovative new mechanical technology, the 640’s gearbox had some fairly substantial teething issues. Testing revealed catastrophic unreliability from the radical new hydraulically operated gearbox.
Hopes were so low in fact that come the first race of the 1989 season, Ferrari big-wig Luca di Montezemolo proposed running the 640 cars on half-full fuel tanks, in order to allow drivers Gerhard Berger and new arrival Nigel Mansell to put on a good show before their inevitable retirement.
Barnard kept the faith however, and ensured the cars’ tanks were full for the Brazilian Grand Prix which opened the 1989 season.
As it happened, his faith was very much rewarded, as Mansell put in a stirring drive to claim victory in his very first race in Rosso Corsa. The anecdote goes that even Mansell himself had so little faith in making it the distance that he’d booked an early flight home, which he duly missed after taking his 640 all the way to the chequered flag. Barnard had once again been vindicated.
It would be fair to say that this win on debut was rather fortuitous though, and over the course of the season the new car’s transmission issues really began to manifest, resulting in hideous unreliability for both drivers, with Berger in particular finishing just three races all year.
When the car finished though, the pace was very much there. The car was on the podium every single time it finished a race and claimed a total of three victories — one for Berger and two for Mansell, including a spellbinding drive at the Hungarian Grand Prix which in my opinion ranks as Mansell’s best-ever performance.
Such results were impossible to ignore, and like with carbon fibre and coke-bottle sidepods before, other teams now felt compelled to look into developing semi-automatic gearboxes of their own. It took some time for everyone to get onboard, but by 1996 every single formula 1 team had swapped over to such units, and Barnard had once again left his mark on the very fabric of the sport.
The pace shown by the 640 also meant that Barnard felt comfortable in designing a refinement of the 640 for the following 1990 season, which would be termed the 641. The primary concern was resolving the reliability issues, which were eventually diagnosed as being caused by a vibration from Ferrari’s equally new V12 engine causing the hydraulic pump belt to come off. This was quickly resolved, and the 641 therefore promised to be equally beautiful to the 640, but actually capable of finishing races.
The car lived up to the promise, as Ferrari contended for a title for the first time since 1985, with Barnard’s old friend Alain Prost leading the charge as the Scuderia’s new talisman.
By the time Prost was fighting for the title in the 641, Barnard was gone though. After 4 years with the Scuderia, he wished to return to a British team, away from the hyper-critical eye of the Italian press. He duly took up a position with Benetton, working as technical director alongside their long-time designer Rory Byrne. If one were being uncharitable, it could be said that this move marked the beginning of Barnard’s decline in F1 — though cars in which he was involved would nevertheless go on to win several more races.
Barnard’s stint at Benetton was only a brief one, but during his tenure there he would contribute to the design of both the B191 and B192 chassis which gave wins to Nelson Piquet and Michael Schumacher respectively. Compared to what he was doing at Ferrari though, it would be fair to say that Barnard’s work at Benetton was far less bleeding-edge.
While both the B191 and B192 were competitive, they were fairly conventional technologically, with both featuring manual H-pattern gearboxes, and relatively little in the way of other innovative accoutrements (though they did see Benetton become an early adopter of the raised nose trend started by Tyrrell with their 1990 019 chassis).
Instead it was teams like Williams who found a technical edge, by refining technologies such as active suspension to dominate in 1992.
After his Benetton stint, Barnard soon found himself back at Ferrari — being parachuted in as part of a shakeup following a truly torrid two year stint which had seen Prost fired at the end of an uncompetitive 1991 season, and then the team’s radical twin-floor F92A prove an utter flop the following year. Ferrari was desperate, and Barnard was once again able to negotiate working from the UK instead of Maranello.
Barnard remained at the Scuderia until 1997, and during his tenure he once again revived the team’s fortunes somewhat, as they won races in all the years he was there.
However, it also seemed that Barnard had fallen away from the very bleeding edge of F1. His 1996 F310 was criticised by many as an inferior car, which only attained results thanks to the newly signed Michael Schumacher’s uncanny ability behind the wheel.
With the 310, Barnard found himself following trends rather than setting them for the first time. It was one of the last cars in Formula 1 to adopt the then-standard high nose design, and was also Ferrari’s first V10-powered car, with the Scuderia finally acquiescing to the advantages of the layout which had been demonstrated by Renault in the late 80s and early 90s. The result was a car that Barnard himself was later forced to admit was severely lacking.
Barnard did remain long enough at Ferrari to be involved in the design of the 1997 F310B, which Schumacher would take tantalisingly close to the world championship crown in 1997, but by mid-season he left, as the team recentred its efforts on Maranello rather than the UK.
Barnard’s last real hurrah came at the Arrows team, which he joined immediately after leaving Ferrari. The team had signed reigning world champion Damon Hill, and were in a rebuilding phase after having been recently bought out by Tom Walkinshaw.
To his credit, Barnard got to work on Arrows’ A18 chassis immediately, and was able to transform it from a car which almost failed to even qualify at its first outing, to one which came within a lap of winning at the Hungarian Grand Prix.
Unfortunately for Barnard though, it was clear by the late 1990s that he had been outstripped by the new generation of Formula 1 engineers such as Adrian Newey, who were able to take the tight packaging principles pioneered by Barnard to new levels. With the exception of Newey, F1 design was also beginning to centre around computer aided design, with Barnard’s once cutting-edge expertise looking very much from a different era.
The change to the aero formula in 1998 which stipulated narrower cars really marked the handover of the baton when it came to Barnard’s F1 tenure, with that year’s Arrows A19 being the last car where he took on the role of chief designer. The car was able to score points, but paled in comparison to the glory of Barnard’s earlier output. Despite his status as an innovator, F1 had simply moved on.
Despite this fall from grace for Barnard, the shadow which he casts over Formula 1 design is a long one. Of the three big-ticket technologies which he pioneered, every single one has stood the test of time, and remains a key part of Formula 1 to this day.
Few other figures in F1 can claim to have produced such long-lived developments, and those few who can are generally considered legends of the sport. Likewise, few other figures’ innovations have affected each of the the aerodynamic, mechanical and safety sides of the sport, yet Barnard produced major developments in all of these areas seemingly effortlessly, with his championing of carbon fibre in particular having unquestionably saved lives.
To think it may never have happened if Barnard hadn’t been able to convince Ron Dennis to give his hare-brained idea a try…
