F1’s first carbonfibre car, the pioneering Mclaren MP4/1
Pioneering by choice, a Mclaren by chance
The story of Mclaren’s pioneering carbonfibre car predates Mclaren as we know it. Had the chips fallen differently it might not even have been a Mclaren – but, at the turn of the 1980s as it is now, money was the essential lubricant that greases the mechanisms of Formula 1. And F1 was where, in 1979, gifted engineer John Barnard and going-places F2 team boss Ron Dennis wanted to be. Driven, ambitious, detailminded and egotistical, both quietly carried chips on their shoulders regarding their lack of formal qualifications. Dennis the mechanic-turned-entrepreneur embraced the modish cod-self-improvement of Edward de Bono’s thinking hats and the exhaustively abstruse phraseology which came to be known as ‘Ronspeak’. Over one or two glasses of wine too many after a chaotic Ferrari test in the late 1980s, Barnard would confide toa Sunday Times journalist that in the company of engineers blessed with doctorates and such he still feared being seen as an “uneducated blacksmith with oily hands”. Indubitably Dennis and Barnard shared tendencies which drew them together and ultimately pushed them apart. As a partnership they would kick down the door of F1 and change it forever.
Where were they coming from? Like many engineers of his era Barnard had entered motor racing via Lola. He then had a spell at Mclaren, working on details of the M23 F1 car and M16 Indycar before leaving, creatively frustrated, and becoming involved in the abortive Vel’s Parnelli Jones F1 team, working alongside ex-lotus designer Maurice Philippe. When Jones closed up shop and retreated to Indycars with scarcely any notice, Barnard followed and threw himself into the Indycar scene, carving out a reputation as an innovator in whatever task he set himself to – chassis layout, gearbox construction, even turbocharging the Cosworth engine. Learning on the job would provide the foundations for what was to come.
Dennis’s Project 4 operation enjoyed high-profile Marlboro backing for its Formula 3 and Formula 2 activities. In 1979 a profitable piece of work had come its way in the form of the BMW M1 Procar championship, a one-make series which had made its way onto the support bill at various F1 rounds owing to connections between BMW and March, whose proprietor was one Max Mosley. It was to be a high-profile affair in which the fastest F1 drivers in practice contested a race in modified M1 supercars. Lamborghini had been contracted to build the M1s, but industrial and financial woe over at Sant’agata Bolognese prompted BMW to look elsewhere, and much of the work fell into Ron’s lap. But still there was a barrier Dennis had failed to breach effectively: the gateway to F1. Motorsport insiders are only half joking when they say Project 4 was named thus because of the failures of the first three.
Barnard returned to the UK having changed the Indycar game with the Chaparral 2K, an exquisitely neat racer which harnessed the ground-effect aerodynamics which were also disrupting F1. Unlike many other engineers, he’d grasped the principle of what Lotus was doing on its pioneering 79 – and benefitted from the input of his mate Patrick Head, who was beavering away in the Imperial College windtunnel on a Williams which would better it. Although Chaparral boss Jim
Hall had made a land-grab for credit, those in the know knew – and Dennis persuaded Barnard to meet. “I’m not interested in F2,” said Barnard. Fine by Dennis – neither was he. Barnard’s demands were simple: he wanted creative freedom to design the most advanced F1 car ever, in a hitherto scarcely used material, and he wanted undisputed credit as its author.
All Dennis needed to do was find the money for it.
Let’s nail the business of who got there first with carbonfibre in F1 right now. Barnard wasn’t the first to identify the potential of what was considered to be a wonder material, the stuff of rocket science, and neither was he the first to use it. Ex-lola man Andy Smallman got there first with the wing struts of the otherwise uncelebrated 1975 Embassy Hill GH1. Gordon Murray claims to have spent at least two years trying to make carbon brake discs work before racing them on the BT46 in 1976; on the BT49 raced in 1979 and beyond he sought to ‘add lightness’ by using carbon panels in place of aluminium ones in the monocoque. As Barnard would go on to prove, this just wasn’t the right way to deploy the material.
Carbonfibre couldn’t simply be used as a like-for-like replacement for the aluminium honeycomb lurking beneath the bodywork of contemporary F1 machinery. The properties of metal were well known and easily calculated. It’s a relatively sympathetic and straightforward material with which to work. Carbonfibre arrives in a roll, like a carpet, and its effectiveness relies on rigorous design and perfect construction quality control. As a fibre it’s only strong in one direction, a property the designer has to manipulate by understanding the load paths the finished component will be subject to, specifying exactly the right number of layers, and avoiding joins. Crafting the component involves great expertise in excluding air pockets between layers and ensuring proper bonds.
One more kicker: by weight, carbonfibre is 10 times more expensive than aluminium. Imagine trying to account for this in 1979 when inflation was running at over 13%, diminishing teams’ spending power almost as they watched.
What Barnard understood – in a way not even Lotus’s Colin Chapman did at the time – was that chassis strength was a key factor in taking ground effect to the next level. His friend Head did – which was why the Williams FW07 was lighting up racetracks as Lotus foundered. Chapman’s blunder was to prioritise maximum downforce, creating loads his cars’ flexy inner structures couldn’t handle. Barnard saw that carbonfibre, properly exploited, could deliver a strong core chassis no wider than the Cosworth DFV engine, leaving the rest of the car’s width free to accommodate ground effect venturi.
Initial contacts with British Aerospace at Weybridge led to an introduction between Barnard and aeronautical engineer Arthur Webb, who combined the material design expertise Barnard required with an old-school slide-rule approach Barnard loved. As the design came together, another challenge hovered into view: who would build the structural elements? UK composites specialists laughed Barnard out of the room on the grounds that it was too complex a task. The only company willing and able to take it on was American: Utah-based Hercules Aerospace, which also built rocket engines.
“WHAT BARNARD UNDERSTOOD WAS THAT CHASSIS STRENGTH WAS A KEY FACTOR IN TAKING GROUND EFFECT TO THE NEXT LEVEL ”
“BARNARD WORKED TIRELESSLY TO DEBUG THE MP4’S VULNERABILITIES – IT WAS BADLY DISCOMBOBULATED BY BUMPS, AND OCCASIONALLY PRONE TO AERODYNAMIC PORPOISING”
The final obstruction seemed insurmountable: who would bankroll the Project 4 F1 team? Not long-time sponsor Marlboro – it already supported a team in F1, albeit one which was on its uppers. Mclaren had lost James Hunt as it slipped from its mid-1970s pomp, and continued to endure misery on-track as its M28 made heavy weather of the ground effect era. Relying on a huge plan area of underfloor bodywork to generate downforce but not strong enough to carry it, the M28 was also overweight and too bluff to be fast in a straight line. Team boss Teddy Mayer described it as “ghastly”. The press described it as “wretched”. Subsequent redesigns and sequels – the moribund M29 and M30 – proved little better.
Dennis, naturally, thought Marlboro should drop Mclaren and back him instead. Marlboro sponsorship guru John Hogan, mindful of the Hunt-flavoured brand equity invested in Mclaren, saw otherwise. He proposed a merger, a prospect equally disagreeable to Dennis and Mayer, but in September 1980 they grudgingly went to the altar. Barnard’s high concept would wear red and white but carry the Mclaren badge.
The fall guy at Mclaren was Gordon Coppuck, who had joined the design office in 1965. Responsible for the neat, effective M16 Indycar and its F1 derivative, the 1974 and 1976 championship-winning M23, Coppuck ran aground while trying to advance Mclaren into the ground-effect era. After leading the design of three unsuccessful cars in 18 months he was exhausted as well as out of political favour.
The MP4 – it gained its /1 later as its replacement took shape – made its race debut in Argentina in 1981, three races in, and its initial promise was masked by teething troubles and a new FIA dictat banning the sliding skirts teams were using to seal the underfloor. Michelin’s radial tyres had a tendency to deform inwards under load rather than ballooning outwards like cross-plies, adding to the complications of choosing ride heights in the fixed-skirt era. Dennis also had to factor in the presence of young, inexperienced and slightly wild Andrea de Cesaris rather than his preferred choice, Alain Prost, who had decided Mclaren wasn’t the team for him after the miseries of 1980. De Cesaris wasn’t trusted with MP4 until round six…
John Watson was the safe pair of hands who scored Mclaren’s first win since the 1977 Japanese GP, and Watson did so on home soil – if assisted by the retirement of the car in front. He was also the first to demonstrate the strength of carbonfibre construction when he ran wide at Monza’s second Lesmo and spun heavily into the inside barrier. The impact sheared off most of the car’s rear end, but of the pile of dust the carbon naysayers were expecting there was none. ‘Wattie’ unbelted himself from the intact monocoque and walked away.
Next season, armed with a B-spec MP4, Watson won two grands prix and finished third in the drivers’ championship. Niki Lauda, lured out of retirement by Dennis to replace the erratic De Cesaris, won on his third time out at Long Beach, and again at Brands Hatch. Barnard worked tirelessly to debug the MP4’S vulnerabilities – it was badly discombobulated by bumps, and occasionally prone to aerodynamic porpoising – with a single-mindedness which earned him the nickname “Prince of Darkness” from departing shareholder Tyler Alexander.
Two years after the ‘merger’, Barnard and Dennis bought out Mayer and Alexander at the end of the 1982 and set an unfettered course towards the Mclaren of recent times. Rivals were still fumbling to understand the principles of MP4’S game-changing design – not helped by the FIA’S late imposition of mandatory flat bottoms for all cars.
This closed the door on ground-effects – but Barnard’s next game-changer was imminent, presaged by a turbopowered MP4/1 appearing towards the end of 1983…