BE AN ENGINEER
F1 innovation legend John Barnard shares his wisdom
John Barnard
The legendary F1 designer explains how you can make it as an engineer
John Barnard has never been one constrained by convention, fitting for a designer responsible for some of motorsport’s greatest innovations.
At the outset of his career he was rejected by Mclaren, yet this proved a blessing as he instead went to Lola, where he crossed paths with Patrick Head.
“We tended to share out a lot of the work,” explains Barnard at the launch of his biography, The Perfect Car. “I did a lot of work on the T260, the Can-am car that Jackie Stewart drove; the two and threelitre sportscars; the Atlantic car.
“I was able to get this all-round experience, which was priceless.”
Underlining the range of tasks, Barnard designed the Supervee T250 from scratch, loaded it on a trailer and drove it to a racing car show to sell. From there, after a brief stint at Mclaren, he went to the US to work for Vel’s Parnelli Jones and then onto Chaparral, where his ground-effect 2K design won the CART title and Indy 500 in 1980.
“At Vel’s Parnelli my first job was to take the Formula 1 car, redesign all of the uprights and suspension, and then the next job was to finish Parnelli’s off-road racer. We jumped from an F1 car to this thing that thunders over rocks and gulleys at 140mph!”
Only then did Barnard put down roots in F1, again with Mclaren, his revolutionary carbonfibre-composite chassis winning three straight titles from 1984-86. He feels that the risks for an engineer getting into F1 too early are even more acute today.
“In an F1 team you’re going to get pigeonholed,” he warns. “Unless you can fight your way out, that’s going to be your bag. I’d want to get some experience first, whether it’s smaller formulas, or sportscars.
“It’s good to get some track experience; you can do that in Formula 3 and these other formulas. You can go to Indycar and learn a very different approach.”
It gets to the core of Barnard’s success – being convinced by your solution even if it’s not the ‘usual’ way.
“If you come up with the right answer in your own mind you need the determination, the guts and the drive to see it through,” he says. “If it’s different in any way, you will have half a dozen people saying,
‘That’s no good, it won’t work’.
“You can have all the qualifications under the sun, but without that determination and bloodymindedness you won’t get there.”
Barnard adds that engineers must also learn from others continuously.
“Don’t think that when you’ve left college or university that you know it all, because you know nothing!” he says. “Be prepared to learn and pick up information all the time.
“Things [in a team] may seem different to what you learned, but they’re different for a good reason – nobody at college has taught you, because you can’t teach it really, a lot of it has to be absorbed as you go along.
“Somewhere along the line you have to come up with an answer to a problem and be convinced that you’ve got the right one.”
Unsurprisingly, Barnard’s favourite cars are his most ground-breaking: the Chaparral, his 1983 ‘Coke-bottle’ Mclaren MP4/1 – “the prettiest of that series” – and the paddleshift Ferrari 640, a winner on its debut in ’89. But there’s one he feels doesn’t get due credit, the high-nose ’91 Benetton B191.
“People I know say that wasn’t such a good car, but if you look at the Benettons after that, they were a development of that, so it led to a line of successful cars.”