This months edition of Racecar Engineering magazine (http://www.racecar-engineering.com/) has an interesting article about the F1 design innovator John Barnard and his career. Growing up in a racing family and with a desire to become an F1 designer, John was a hero of mine, and the one engineer I desperately wanted to work with and learn from. After losing out on just such a job offer whilst he was at Arrows, I eventually did get my dream job working with him at the age of 25 at B3 Technologies, when he was design consultant for Prost.
It's always interesting to read articles about people that you know ever so well. Have you ever read an article about something or someone you know well? Well if you have you'll know that journalists never seem to catch the person of story correctly, and it's disappointing when the rest of the world then takes that as the gospel just because it's laid down in print.
Well so it's true to a certain degree with articles written about John. I must admit that we fell out in the end, but, I think I have enough respect for him as an engineer, and I have enough self-respect and passion for engineering that I can give a fairer assessment of him as a person than any journalist interviewing him can.
What comes across in the interview is his design genius in how he innovated step changes in F1 technology, which is as you can imagine is slightly far fetched. By the mid-late eighties F1 design teams were expanding and consisted of ever larger numbers of engineers, and by the late nineties when I first got involved there were up to 50 people designing parts in each team. So to say that one person was responsible for the whole idea and for making it work is stretching the truth a bit far. It annoys me today the way that Adrian Newey is lauded as the design for Red Bull, he might have ultimate responsibility but he is really a manager of very many talented individuals, the original ideas for many innovations and developments will have come from a number of sources that you will never hear credited.
The paddle gear change for example I was told was already on the drawing board when John joined Ferrari. If this is the case is it really fair to credit him with the idea? In practicality I believe it is actually fair, because, what noone really stresses about John, is that he is very supportive and has incredible attention to detail. I have no doubt that John made that idea work, even if it wasn't actually his initial idea. He was always prepared to listen to your ideas, work through them with you, see how they'd fit into other ideas and concepts and help you detail the design through to manufacture and realisation. So he is exceptionally supportive in that way and as a very young and inexperienced engineer it was so exciting to have that support and encouragement from an icon like him. Working under him was not easy, extremely long hours including Saturdays and no care that you had a life and family outside of the company. That's what F1 is like, it's total immersion, and I bet everyone is grateful for the regulated August break nowadays.
The contradiction is that he would never credit anyone publicly with any ability. I bet if you were to ask him about the current crop of technical bosses that used to work for him, his opening line will certainly be "when I first employed him, he couldn't draw a milk bottle". F1 is not only competitive on track, but, it's a competitive working environment. You don't get your crack at the top jobs unless you are prepared to stab a few friends in the back, and, I guess maybe this side to him is just a reflection of the competitive environment.
It's true that he knows how to explode and scream and shout, during the first Gulf war his employees termed it "Scudding" after the Iraq missiles. Basically if you did something wrong you could expect him to explode like a Scud missile. These explosive episodes were never fun to be on the receiving end of, but, actually in all fairness he didn't hold grudges and saw the mistakes as interesting problems to be worked through. It was sometimes hard not to laugh, one time he was punching himself in the head in the middle of the design office after being given some bad news, the barer of that bad news, a fabricator had to point out he was "a fucking psyco!". A few minutes after a scudding, he'd likely be your friend again and sat on your shoulder enjoying the challenge of finding a solution to the problem. And this is where you see the passion for engineering that he has, and that I guess even in retirement he hasn't lost. By the time I worked with him, he wasn't bothered about going to the track and races, his passion was in the fine details and in making ever more perfect components. The compound benefits of fine detail improvements was his idea of a significant performance advantage. It upsets me to see some of the current crop of F1 cars, in that some components have still not matched the detail we achieved in the late 90's early 2000's on the Prost!
Another side that doesn't come across in interviews and articles is that he's actually very funny, he's totally un-PC and everyone feels sorry for his long suffering wife. He definitely calls a spade a spade in company he feels comfortable with, he's shy in large groups and new environments, and therefore you only see the real side of him when he's comfortable with you. That's a double edged sword, because only those he's comfortable with will get a full assault scudding, but, also those people are the only one's who get to see the best side of him. He tells a really good story too and as you can imagine with the length of his career he has a lot of stories to tell. If ever you needed a break from an intense design session with him, we all developed little tricks to set him off on story time. He is also colour blind and to keep ourselves amused we'd like to tell him the wrong colour for each line on the CAD screen, so when he next referred to it we could try and confuse him.
At the launch of the Prost AP03 John and I flew out together and the plane had to land at a different airport due to bad fog. Whilst waiting for several hours on the runway to make the short flight back to Barcelona he told me how the deal unfolded with Enzo Ferrari the first time he set up a design office for them. He wouldn't divulge numbers but did say that he was asked how much it would take to get him on board, so he wrote on a piece of paper a number he thought so outrageous Ferrari wouldn't pay it, only for Enzo to agree instantly. That trip we got to our hotel at about 4am and we had to leave for the circuit at 6am, I was up and ready in reception with all the French mechanics who distrusted John and anyone associated with him, and there was no sign of John. I had the reception call him only for him to still be in bed and decide we could stay in bed for another hour or so!
At that test the pit lane was full of gossip mostly spread by Alex Wurtz who was riding up and down pulling tricks on a mountain bike, about one teams technical director who had just been forced to resign over allegations he had a foot fetish. Apparently this guy been fondling the feet of several of the teams female employees under the guise of a secret project. John found it hysterical and joined in the conversation in his normal no nonsense manner.
I think in conclusion it's a shame he wasn't more of a racer, and if he'd committed more to being a traditional technical director and taken full control of the cars performance and stuck with teams and seen through all the developments to their conclusion you'd see a CV with more championships than Adrian Newey. But, John is a real engineers engineer, and it's a shame that the general F1 public can't get a better look at the details of the components and designs he directed. So for young aspiring engineers, try to see through the media's obsession with pinning all the work on one person and forget about the wild fanciful innovations that are going to revolutionise performance and concentrate and learn to love the details, take concepts and push them to the limit by looking at the fine details. Radical innovations may come as a result of your detailed understanding of the problem, but, also you'll only ever get the best out of any idea if you don't focus on the detail. To all young engineers who aren't going to get the benefit of learning from John now, but, hopefully you can find someone like him who is prepared to show you enough respect to nurture and guide you to be a better engineer.
