Former F1 Designer Barnard Moves to MotoGP

Formula One car designer John Barnard has been appointed technical director of the MotoGP team run by former 500cc World Champion Kenny Roberts.

"Bringing John into our organisation is another step in our quest to achieve a higher level of engineering, overall expertise and competitiveness," said Roberts, father of his World Champion namesake, in a statement today.

"I've known John for a lot of years and have complete faith in his ability to help us evolve our company and our team to a higher level."

Barnard has an impressive pedigree with 35 years involvement in Formula One, working for McLaren, Benetton, Ferrari, Arrows and latterly as a consultant to the failed Prost team.

With Gordon Coppuck, he helped design McLaren's 1974 title-winning M23 as well as the MP4/1 of 1981. Barnard then led Ferrari's design team from his Guildford headquarters in Britain in the 1980s and developed the semi-automatic gearbox.

Roberts said the designer would be responsible for all Team KR's engineering and technical developments, including this year's Proton KR V-5 four-stroke Grand Prix bike.

"There are a lot of things that can be done with motorcycles," said Barnard. "There are new ways to make things as well as new ways to approach things in general."

Roberts' team ran a two-stroke bike in MotoGP last season with Briton Jeremy McWilliams and Japan's Nobuatsu Aoki.