The Maurice Hamilton interview: John Barnard

"Nigel had been leading and singing nursery rhymes to me over the radio - as Nigel does. Suddenly, he came screaming on the radio, saying the steering wheel was falling off"

From designing an Indy 500 winner in his father's front room to launching the semi-automatic gearbox on an unsuspecting world, pioneering designer John Barnard has had an immense impact on motor racing. Nowadays he's just as happy designing furniture - in carbonfibre, of course...

These days, F1 designers are so tightly restricted that innovation is all too often crushed by the need to tick regulatory boxes. John Barnard, it could be said, caused many of those boxes to be created in the first place, mainly because of an unerring ability to think beyond them.

A designer's life in the 1980s was, to use a Barnard expression, all about making a step.

Not a tiny shuffle forward with an aero flick or endplate slot worth 0.01secs, but a massive stride, quite often into the unknown.

Barnard introduced F1 to the carbonfibre chassis with his McLaren MP4/1 in 1981. He started another revolution eight years later by doing away with the manual gearbox and bringing a paddle gearshift to the Ferrari 640. In the space of a decade, the Englishman had significantly changed the face of F1 design on several fronts.

Pioneering work comes with baggage, both political and personal. Barnard's success was created not simply through ingenuity and brilliance but also thanks to a relentless desire to complete the job with a hitherto unseen dedication to detail. There were no half measures; no making do with file or hammer.

If it didn't fit perfectly, the component had no place in Barnard's product. And, quite often, neither did the hapless technician or mechanic. Working for John Barnard was no trip to Paris. But if you went the distance, the rewards and respect were on a thrilling new level.

The MP4/1, Formula 1's first carbonfibre chassis © LAT

Barnard's inability to suffer fools gladly found fertile ground within the pages of journals reporting on his work. His relationship with the media could best be described as 'eventful'.

A withering look would quickly convey that this was not the right moment to talk or that the writer had just demonstrated a technical understanding far below the designer's expectations. Equally, choosing the right moment would be rewarded with humorous and honest discussion that lacked the secrecy accompanying so many of today's designers.

Barnard left F1 in 2001 to concentrate on carbonfibre furniture and collapsible bikes.

He's based in Switzerland but, on a rare visit back to the UK, he joined us at the William Bray, Julian Bailey's restaurant and bar in the village of Shere, near the Surrey offices where John used to work for McLaren and Ferrari.

There is a lot of ground to cover. And it's clear that this is a 'right moment' to cover it.

Maurice Hamilton: What on earth got you into carbon furniture?

John Barnard: After the Ferrari thing finished, I took over the company we'd set up, B3 Technologies. We started working for Arrows then Prost. When Prost went bang, it left us in a bit of a hole, so we went commercial. This was interesting because it meant completely changing the structure of the company. It makes me laugh today when I hear people in F1 bleating about money getting tight and so on.

When venturing into what you might call the 'outside world', you soon realise that everybody in F1 gets paid way over the odds - right down to the bloke on the shop floor. You discover you have to change wage structures and all sorts of things in order to carry on commercially. I started looking around for other things to do. In 1995, I'd been elected as an RDI [Royal Designer for Industry], which covers all disciplines of design.

MH: Do you apply for that?

JB: No. You get elected by your peers. At the time, it was limited to 100 people in total. Patrick Head is also an RDI. It's quite an honour, really. I think we're the only two racing people. Through the RDI I met a furniture designer called Terence Woodgate. We got talking and he had an idea for a table - a really thin one. Between us, we concocted this carbon table.

MH: He didn't know much about carbonfibre?

JB: Exactly. His was more the aesthetic input; I was the engineering input. We've a number of different tables now, and we did a carbon chair, too. I've worked on lots of projects. I designed a home/office setup - things like that. If you ask me what I do all day, I'd have a job telling you; all I know is that I seem to be busy all the time.

Barnard (left) and Dennis flank John Watson, 1981 © LAT

MH: Running your own company is quite a change for you, isn't it? If I go right back to when you joined Project Four Racing with Ron Dennis then started McLaren International with him in 1980, he would look after the business end of things and you would get on with design. I remember you telling me at the time that's what you liked about the partnership.

JB: Absolutely. Running the company was not really what I wanted to do. When I had B3, there were several problems; one was that some F1 teams were nervous about giving us work because I was there. They thought: "He's going to go off to another team; he's going to know what we're doing" and so on. I needed to be more of a salesman than an engineer, which isn't my bag at all. I don't do networking and I don't do bullshit, and that doesn't work if you're trying to find business. Design is what I'm about.

MH: So what gave you the inspiration to use carbonfibre in a racing car?

JB: Before I started working with Ron, I'd done the Chaparral 2K, which was really quite a step forward for IndyCars. It was the first proper ground-effect IndyCar and it's still my favourite car. It was designed in my dad's front room in Wembley! It just went together and it worked. When people asked where I did the windtunnel work, I said: "At the kitchen table while I was having breakfast." That car put me on the map.

Ron wanted to go into F1 and we agreed a deal at the end of 1979, which meant I didn't have to race in '80. To have a whole year to make a car ready to race was unusual. I thought: 'I've got to make the most of this. How can I make a step?' Ground effect was in full flow. To optimise that I wanted the best underwing possible, which meant having a narrow chassis. When you narrow the chassis, certainly at the bottom, you start to lose structural stiffness. I needed to get it back and started thinking about a steel-skin monocoque instead of an aluminium one but, of course, that gets too heavy.

Carbon was already around in F1. Gordon Murray may already have used it on one of his Brabhams... just kind of riveted and glued on a panel. Various wings were being reinforced with a bit of carbon, and so on. I arranged a visit to British Aerospace in Weybridge at a time when they were making the RB211 engine, part of which - the cowling, I think - was a carbon honeycomb structure.

That's when the idea of making a carbonfibre chassis began to take shape in my head.

Barnard with the MP4/1B at Monza, 1982 © LAT

MH: It's one thing to make an engine cowling in carbonfibre, but quite another to have a racing car with all the stresses and safety concerns...

JB: Yes, plus designing in composite as opposed to metal is very different. It's like sticky wallpaper to start off with. You have to make moulds to cure it into the shape you want and try to do away with joints. Instead of having lots of aluminium glued and riveted together, you make that shape in one piece if you can. I plumped for making the chassis on the outside of a male mould because we didn't have CNC five-axis machines that can machine 3D shapes.

We ended up making a chassis that was effectively flat faces all joined together, because it was so hard to do anything else. It was all done on a drawing board, which meant we were designing in 2D. There were no computer models. Those sorts of machines just didn't exist back then, so it was a very different process.

MH: So you were venturing into the unknown, particularly with regard to safety?

JB: Exactly. We had hardly any information on the energy absorption of carbon. In terms of making calculations on crash-worthiness, forget it. We had no idea. When Wattie [John Watson] had the accident at Monza in 1981, I had a couple of guys from the Civil Aviation Authority phone to ask if they could come and have a look. They wanted to see what would happen to a composite monocoque - and this was a perfect demonstration

[Watson lost it at the exit of Lesmo 2, and the McLaren hit the barrier with such force that the Ford-Cosworth engine was ripped off and ended up, complete with gearbox and transmission, on the opposite side of the track.]

The monocoque was fine. Until then, people were saying: "When it hits something, there'll be a cloud of black dust and nothing left." In fact the driver's cell was better protected than if it had been an aluminium monocoque. Wattie had given it a good old thump!

MH: It can't have been easy, people asking questions all the time before that and you just having to rely on your judgement.

JB: It's all about your overall gut feeling. I'd been operating on my own for a number of years and I'd been making all the decisions myself; you just get used to it. It's the job of the designer to make the right call and at the time we didn't have logging systems all over the car, telling you this, that and the other.

One thing that gets my goat is that some people - I won't mention names - say: "Of course, it was obvious to use carbonfibre; that was clearly the way to go." How many of these people have sat down with a completely blank sheet of paper when somebody's said: "Design me a car"? Where do you start? All the cars now are developments of a theme, using the same basic chassis.

You don't sit down very often and design a car from scratch now. I did it with the Chaparral and I did it with the McLaren. I did it with the Ferraris, but not to the same extent.

Ferrari won in Brazil in 1989 - the first time it used the new semi-automatic gearbox © LAT

MH: Let me ask about the Ferrari's semi-automatic gearbox. It seems an obvious thing now, but tell me how it was at the time.

JB: The truth is, I got tired of trying to find a nice run through the chassis, past the engine and down into the gearbox with a shifting rod. And then this awful gear lever getting in the way of everything, making this big bulge on the side of the cockpit. I'm thinking: "How do I get rid of that lot? Surely all I need is a button on the steering wheel and a little hydraulic cylinder that shifts the gear?

You can still have a clutch. The driver just has to get used to pushing a button instead of moving a gear lever. If I do that, all I need is an electrical cable going to the back of the car and not all these rods and things." So that was the thinking behind it. Once you start developing the idea, a whole stream of things emerges, such as automatic shifting and a guarantee of no engine over-revving.

MH: The first race for the Ferrari was Brazil in 1989. A lot of things went wrong during practice.

JB: You can say that again. When we went testing there, we could only do a few laps and then it would stop. The newspaper reports kept saying: "Gearbox stopped again. Gearbox stopped again. Gearbox stopped again" because the Italian rags love a scandal if they can make one.

In fact, it wasn't the gearbox; we'd lost power. The belt was being thrown off the alternator, which was on the front of the crankshaft. So, it lost power and the batteries to start the car were so small.

The first thing that stopped was the gearbox - not the engine. One more second and it would have been the engine that stopped, not the gearbox. After many, many months, they found the problem on the dyno when they set up a high-speed camera. The first V12 had a four-bearing crank and the crank started doing a whip at certain revs, which caused the pulley on the front of the crank to start wobbling.

MH: So, despite winning, it was doing that all the way through the race in Rio?

JB: I guess it was. The problem was that we hadn't gone very far during testing. We'd do maybe ten laps and then there'd be problems. We didn't expect to finish that race. Cesare Fiorio was team manager and before the race he suggested we should just have half a tank of fuel and make a show [there was no refuelling in 1989]. It was very tempting, but I said: "No, let's fill it up. You never know. Let's give it a chance."

Then the steering wheel falls off in the middle of the race. There were three bolts holding the wheel in place - and two of the buggers fell out.

Mansell's triumph came after steering wheel dramas © LAT

MH: Nigel Mansell made a stop, didn't he?

JB: Yeah, Nigel had been leading and singing nursery rhymes to me over the radio - as Nigel does. Suddenly, he came screaming on the radio, saying the steering wheel was falling off. We'd got one loose bolt hanging in there and Nigel had to force the wheel against the cross of the column to steer. He's a strong bloke - which was lucky because the steering wheel had the clutch, the gearshift and all the other stuff as part of it.

We had one spare steering wheel and I'm not even sure it had been tested. Joan Villadelprat, who'd come with me from McLaren, was chief mechanic and he went and found this spare wheel. When Nigel came in, I think I leaned in and pulled off the steering wheel, and Joan then smacked the new one in place. He hammered it so hard, he cut his hand open. He just smashed this thing on and, bugger me, it worked.

It had all the gears - everything. I couldn't believe it.

MH: On reflection, what do you think of the setup you had with Ferrari? You were based not far from here in Surrey, but the team operated from Maranello. I suppose it must have been okay because you did two spells with Ferrari...

JB: Well, the first time round I didn't want to go to Ferrari. I had the same shareholding as Ron in McLaren International, once we bought out Teddy Mayer and Tyler Alexander. I later decided I wanted to sell my shares to raise some money. I had a young family, I wanted a bigger house - all of that. Mansour Ojjeh bought me out, which meant I was still technical director and working the same way I'd always done. But I was no longer a shareholder in McLaren.

I was contacted by a guy in London; he had something to do with American Express. He went on about working for Ferrari and I kept saying no. They kept raising the salary but I repeatedly said I didn't want to work in Italy; I had my family and they came first. Then I was asked, what if I could set up something in the UK? I said that changed things for me. We got into discussion, and the deal was done.

MH: You reached a compromise, didn't you? The chassis was actually made at your headquarters in Shalford, not far from here.

JB: I had a design office there, but I was so nervous about them making composite stuff, apart from bodywork. We made all the chassis and suspension in England. The '89 car, with its paddle-shift gearbox, won three races so we were on an upward swing. I designed the 1990 car before I left and it almost won the title, but then they all fell out. By then I was at Benetton. The second time at Ferrari [1992-1997] never really happened the way it was supposed to.

Luca di Montezemolo was now in charge and I remember this meeting in London. Harvey Postlethwaite was back in Maranello and basically they wanted me to do the same thing again. Six months before that, Ferrari sold the first company we'd set up to McLaren because McLaren couldn't find anywhere with a big enough autoclave to make their road car. When Ferrari started talking to me for a second time, it was before they'd actually done the deal with McLaren. I said to Montezemolo: "If you take my advice, you won't sell that to McLaren because it's going to fix all their problems.

"If you don't, I know they're going to have a problem making that road car. Don't sell it to them because you're just going to make life easy for your opposition." So, what did Ferrari do?

Postlethwaite left Maranello for Tyrell © LAT

MH: Let me guess - they sold the Shalford facility to McLaren?

JB: They did. And six months later, Ferrari came back and said they wanted to do it again and set up something in the UK. Which we did - next door to the original place. Montezemolo said to me and Harvey: "Go into that room and talk between yourselves; see what you think; see if you think it can work."

I said to Harvey: "What do you reckon?" He said: "Hmm, don't know. Money's good though, isn't it?" So I said: "Yeah, you're right. Let's do it." I told Ferrari we couldn't do what we did last time, which was to put me in charge and run it from the UK. That didn't work. We needed to set up a design office and windtunnel in the UK and work on next season's car. Harvey would look after the race team and race cars in Maranello, modifying them for the season in hand. That was how it was supposed to work.

Of course, six months into the deal, Harvey's gone to Tyrrell and di Montezemolo is on the phone, asking what we're going to do for the next race; what are we changing? So, I'm saying: "Hang on; I told you this can't work." But that's how it went for the next four-and-a-half years.

MH: That's a shame, because with Harvey there and you doing your thing in the UK, you're both speaking the same language. So it doesn't matter how far apart you are because you both know what you're talking about. Job done. And you have Harvey, fluent in Italian, at the other end.

JB: Exactly. The big thing then was when to start looking at next year's car. If you're having a good season, the moment you start looking at the new car gets closer and closer to the limit. So you have to make decisions without all the proper windtunnel work. This was a chance to avoid that, but it never happened. I thought, what do I do? No point walking away. So that was the second time. It just never worked.

MH: With today's technology it would be easier to pass information back and forth. Was that a problem? How did you relay drawings and stuff?

JB: We had early cad-cam systems, but did most of the work on the drawing board. We weren't quite at the point of being able to send designs back and forth at the flick of a switch.

Newey: one of the few modern-day designers Barnard believes has a suitable level of control © XPB

MH: If you were 15 or 20 years younger, would you like to be involved now or is F1 narrow to the point where you just can't be innovative?

JB: It's a difficult one to answer. From what I see now, the current teams are so big that if you're quite senior or near the top, all you are is a manager. You're just dealing with people and paper shuffling. I don't know what happens at Red Bull, I don't know what Adrian Newey does, but I'm sure it's more than simple hands-on windtunnel work, track tests and so on.

Maybe with a setup like that I'd be interested to be involved today. But it seems to me that most people at the top are managers. Apart from Adrian, the only other designer with the sort of control I would like was James Allison when he was with Lotus. I think I actually brought James into F1 when he worked for me at Benetton in the windtunnel. He came straight from college. He's a very bright boy.

MH: The big story this year is managing tyres. Reading through an interview I did with you in 1983, things don't change because you'd just got back from Imola and you were scratching your head over tyre behaviour that weekend. Pre-race testing had been fine but it all changed from practice to the warm-up on race morning, and from there to the race itself. When I came to see you a few days later, you were still baffled.

JB: That's right. The clouds would come over, then the sun would reappear a lap or two later. We were moaning about Wattie and saying: "What the hell is he doing? He's a second a lap slower now!" In ten laps the whole thing changed and we had no idea what was going on.

MH: F1 is much the same now, yet people criticise it as if it's something new. But surely it's part of the game - and always has been?

JB: Absolutely. Any kind of engineer, given a problem, wants to find a solution. The problem in those situations is that the answer lies mainly with tyre people and, as you know, '83 was a weird year. We went from finishing one-two at Long Beach to not qualifying in Monaco.

MH: Extraordinary by any standards. I'll never forget Ron's face. Monaco - of all places.

JB: It was all down to tyres. But I think it's good. People say it's not a drivers' test; it's a test for engineers. I don't agree. It's a drivers' test really, because if a driver is any good, he'll give you a lot of feedback. Even with telemetry, the driver plays a big part in the direction the team takes. Top drivers still make a difference. That's a fact.

Of the drivers he worked with, Prost remains Barnard's benchmark © LAT

MH: Which driver did you most enjoy working with in terms of analytical feedback?

JB: Alain Prost. In terms of following a direction you're taking with a car setup, he was a master. Another driver I enjoyed working with was Gerhard Berger because he was a nice guy.

MH: How was he, technically?

JB: He was alright; not bad at all. But Prostie was in a different league. He'd say something about the car, I'd make the change and we'd go forwards. We were on the same wavelength. Niki Lauda was half a second slower than Alain, and Niki knew it. In terms of analysing a car and tyres, Alain worked miracles. He'd cruise around for the first ten laps with a full tank. By race end, he'd be taking the lead from the idiots who'd been blasting round corners because his tyres were ten times better than theirs.

MH: Prost made it look so easy.

JB: That's because he could drive a car with understeer that none of the others could manage. When Keke Rosberg came to McLaren, we were at opposite ends of the scale. It was hard for me to get the car to work. But Alain wanted it like that, because the front end was quite low in aerodynamic downforce; there was a lot of rear-wheel bias, aerodynamically, with him. With more mechanical grip at the front, and the front therefore being softer, a lot of guys would want to charge up to the corner, wrench the wheel around and the car would just roll onto that outside front wheel and they start to lose the back end. Whatever it was that Prostie did, he didn't do that in the corner.

MH: You never got to work with Senna, did you?

JB: No, I just missed him. He was probably the only guy who could manage the car like Alain because he could drive however he wanted. But I never worked with him. Prost and Senna in the same team? Coo, that must have been tasty.