Barnard also spent a year doing work for Kenny Roberts’ Moto GP team and has become a big fan of two-wheeled racing. Barnard and his wife, Rosemary, have two adult daughters, Jennifer and Gillian, and a son, Michael, who’s in his final year at university. John is enjoying a slower pace of life these days and contemplating retiring to Switzerland.
“I come into B3 Technologies most days to sort through my emails and talk to my managing guys here,” Barnard says. “Then I disappear home and do all sorts of things from hacking away at the rhododendrons to anything and everything.”
Recently,
Max Mosley and the
FIA have been talking a lot about
F1 adopting green technology in 2011. Barnard chuckles at the prospect, believing a move in this direction should have been initiated by the FIA ten years ago.
“I did an interview a few weeks ago for a TV show that’s being produced about green technology and I said in this interview that to be honest, I think
Formula 1 has missed the boat,” Barnard remarked. “I think Formula 1 should have been entering into it ten years ago. It should have been going on for a long time.
“I do think the first step really is to avoid wasting energy,” he added. “The first problem you’ve got is there is so much energy wasted. The energy expelled during braking, for example, as well as the heat expended by the engine.”
Barnard points out that the technology to convert waste energy into power or electricity is becoming more and more common in road cars but remains untouched by racing cars.
“You’ve had electronic retarders on lorries for donkey’s years and there’s all sorts of stuff like that that could be incorporated,” Barnard said. “Just now,
BMW have launched the new 1-Series which has got the stop-engine technology for city driving so that every time you stop the engine stops. I think it’s got electronically-clutched alternators so that they only generate when you’re braking. So when you’re trying to lose energy they are producing energy into the battery.
