How a misunderstanding dogged Ferrari's last V12 screamer

John Barnard's second sojourn at Ferrari might have proved less fruitful in terms of innovation and his ongoing quest to build the perfect car, but it produced some of the most elegant cars of the 1990s (and one noticeably less so) as well as delivering a victorious send-off for the V12 engine in Formula 1. And there are some who believe that, in different hands, Barnard's penultimate Ferrari, the 412 T2, might have been a championship challenger...

Barnard had been out of the Maranello orbit for just two and a half years when, in the summer of 1992, Niki Lauda began to phone him. Initially, Barnard instructed his staff to tell Lauda he was out. Ferrari was at a low competitive ebb with the catastrophic F92A and, as a result, the management revolving door was spinning furiously.

Luca di Montezemolo had assumed control and recruited Lauda as a consultant; soon Jean Todt would be hired from Peugeot and institute sweeping change, but for now Lauda worked his contacts book, approaching those he rated highly: Gerhard Berger to drive, and Barnard to superintend the technicalities.

The sticking point was that Lauda wanted Barnard's feet under a desk in Maranello, an arrangement Barnard would barely entertain. Having mulled the idea of assembling a team that could commute to Italy by private jet for the working week, returning at weekends, Barnard dug his feet in. In other circumstances the two sides would never have reached a compromise, but Lauda and Montezemolo were desperate for stardust, and Barnard had precious little other work coming in.

Necessity therefore lubricated a deal which, in hindsight, was never going to work: Barnard could, as before, establish a research and design hub near his Godalming home while fellow returnee Harvey Postlethwaite, freshly recruited from Sauber's nascent team, fronted ongoing development in Maranello. "Trouble is," Barnard would later rue, "after a few months Harvey buggered off."

The ban on active suspension for 1994 worked in Barnard's favour, since Ferrari's system had never worked properly, and he was able to shape his concept on a blank canvas

While trying to develop his own concept - which would become the 1994 412 T1 - from scratch, Barnard became embroiled in the in-season development of Postlethwaite's 1993 car, which itself was a fettled and (partially) debugged version of the F92A. It was a typical scenario for Ferrari at the time and, arguably, today: lack of success on track causes a panic, which draws in all resources. Barnard began to receive stiffly-worded faxes from the newly-installed Todt bemoaning the state of play.

Despite the ongoing angst of 1993, Barnard delivered the stunningly beautiful and aerodynamically innovative 412 T1 for the following season. The ban on active suspension for 1994 worked in Barnard's favour, since Ferrari's system had never worked properly, and he was able to shape his concept on a blank canvas. Teams such as Williams, carrying over aero philosophies that had come to be dependent on hydropneumatic sleight-of-hand, initially stumbled.

Unfortunately, the key innovation behind the 412 T1's aero concept didn't work as expected - not because it was a bad idea but because it was imperfectly executed, owing to Ferrari's internal dysfunction. Inspired by the Spitfire aircraft's cooling architecture, it used heat from the radiators to energise incoming air from a relatively small aperture, reducing drag.

The 412 T1's curvy shape was described in the Italian press as resembling "a pebble washed by the sea". Central to this work of art were the distinctively scalloped sidepods, bearing asymmetric water radiators: one sidepod accommodated a smaller unit alongside the complete oil cooler. But the car was bedevilled by cooling problems, and attention from the press - and management - focused on Barnard and those sidepods.

Much to Barnard's chagrin, Todt brought former Ferrari man Gustav Brunner back into the fold to modify the car at Maranello. Only after Brunner had reworked the design, fitting a new wing and bargeboards, which in turn required a redesign of the sidepods, did the truth emerge: the engine department had got the plumbing wrong. Until then the belief was the apertures weren't big enough.

"About two-thirds of the flow was going through the small radiator and one-third through the big radiator," Barnard said in a 2010 interview with Motor Sport magazine. "They hadn't tuned the pipes on the engine to distribute the water, so we were struggling for cooling.

"We ended up chopping lumps out of the inlet to make it bigger and I remember flying to Canada with lumps of carbon in our suitcases to glue on to make the inlet bigger. It was all the bloody engine, which pisses me off to this day, frankly."

Of wider import was that half a season had been lost to politics and the blame game - exacerbated by Berger and Jean Alesi qualifying 1-2 for the German GP and Berger winning the race just after the car had undergone its B-spec surgery. The inevitable post hoc conclusion reached by the majority was that Barnard's design was flawed and Brunner had fixed it.

Even when viewed objectively, the cooling farrago was the kind of avoidable pitfall caused when a car is designed in one country and blueprints are faxed to another for assembly.

This revelation also arrived so late in the day that Barnard had abandoned the advanced cooling set-up in the 412 T2, design of which was already well under way. The focus on this car would be to tidy up the perceived flaws of the 412 T1 and cautiously advance some of the smaller innovations first seen on the 1994 car.

Among these were the adoption of flexures in the front suspension where the wishbones connected to the monocoque, a junction previously achieved via a ball joint. It saved weight and theoretically gave more consistent feel, since heat build-up during races tended to soften the joint. Berger liked the new system but Alesi, noting that no other car in the pitlane had it, took a dim view. Nevertheless, Barnard pushed on, specifying carbonfibre wishbones and flexures rather than a steel and titanium arrangement. This is now a standard design in F1.

The 412 T2 retained a transverse gearbox, following the principle of keeping as much weight within the wheelbase as possible. During 1994, Barnard had adopted titanium for the gearbox casing, and on the T2 designed a hybrid construction with the bellhousing - the area of the gearbox to which the suspension components are mounted - made from CFRP (carbonfibre reinforced polymer), drastically reducing mass.

The writing was on the wall for the V12 engine: it had more moving parts to go wrong than a V10, more internal friction, and made no more power

Aerodynamically, Barnard's team also had to incorporate a number of mandatory features introduced by the FIA to reduce cornering speeds. In the wake of Ayrton Senna's death in 1994, the governing body reduced diffuser and front-wing endplate sizes, and introduced the underfloor 'plank', along with slots in the engine cover. For 1995, the regime adopted smaller front and rear wings, stepped underfloors, and higher sidepods and cockpit sides. Engine capacity was cut from 3.5 to three litres.

Poor reliability neutered much of the promise of the 412 T2 as the 1995 season evolved into a battle between Damon Hill in a Williams and Michael Schumacher in a Benetton. Ferrari occasionally got in the mix, and Alesi scored a memorable victory in Canada - his only grand prix win - but he also retired from, or was overtaken late on, while in winning positions in at least three other races. The writing was on the wall for the V12 engine: it had more moving parts to go wrong than a V10, more internal friction, and made no more power.

Even before the 1995 season began, new engine chief Paolo Martinelli had decided the future lay in a V10. Barnard was also considering his future, briefly entertaining an offer to return to McLaren. As Alesi took his maiden win in Montreal, rumours began to circulate of another seismic shift in F1: that Todt was wooing Schumacher to Maranello.

The world champion duly signed on the dotted line. He and Barnard would only briefly overlap - Todt had decided the design function must move to the Ferrari factory - but in a post-season test Schumacher got a taste of the car he'd just beaten. When the initial batch of V10 engines proved unreliable, the V12-engined 412 T2 pictured was included in the truck to Estoril as a back-up.

Conditions, obviously, were different in winter, but it's believed Schumacher had a representative amount of fuel on board - and, within a handful of laps, he circulated the Portuguese track almost a second quicker than either Berger or Alesi had at the grand prix earlier that year. But Schumacher was diplomatic once Dictaphones were pressed under his nose.

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"I cannot speculate on how many races I might have won if I had been at Ferrari this year," he told the press. "That is not the point. But this car is very, very good."

According to Barnard, it was a different story behind closed doors: "Jean and Gerhard always said the 12-cylinder was sensitive to throttle lift-off, almost as though there was a lot of friction in the engine, and as soon as you backed off it gave you a big anchor at the back and they didn't like that.

"But, when Michael drove the V12, he was a second a lap quicker and said, 'Oh, I could have won the championship much more easily with this car...'"