John Barnard has some useful thoughts and opinions for racing’s rule makers.
Back in the eighties and nineties, John Barnard was one of the sport’s most influential racing car designers. Barnard first made his mark in the mid-seventies by revolutionizing USAC Championship racing with the Parnelli VPJ6B and 6C Indy cars which brought the Coworth DFX turbo V-8 to USAC and then CART. A few years later he designed and produced for Jim Hall the equally revolutionary Chaparral 2K, the first real, ground-effect Indy car.
Barnard’s success with Indy cars prompted Ron Dennis to hire him and Barnard became technical director of the newly-minted
McLaren International team. Dennis was the managing director and chief shareholder in company with Barnard and Creighton Brown, and also Teddy Mayer and Tyler Alexander, co-owners of the original McLaren team.
Barnard designed the ground-breaking McLaren MP4/1 which was the first carbon-chassised Formula 1 car and in 1984 Dennis, Brown and Barnard bought Mayer and Alexander’s shares in the team. After switching from Ford/Cosworth to TAG/Porsche turbo engines, McLaren’s Barnard-penned cars won the
F1 world championship with Niki Lauda in 1984 and Alain Prost in 1985 and ‘86.
At the end of 1986, Barnard was head-hunted by Enzo Ferrari and worked as the Italian team’s technical director for three years before moving to the Benetton team for a few years. Barnard returned to Ferrari in 1992 for a five-year stint through early 1997 in which he witnessed the beginning of the Schumacher era chez
Ferrari. Barnard worked for the Arrows team from the spring of 1997 though ‘98, then spent a few years as a consultant to Alain Prost’s team.
Since then Barnard has been out of
Formula 1. His B3 Technologies company, based in Guildford, southwest of London, does all kinds of design and consulting work.
