Brawn didn't come up with the DDD though. Plus, just how much of those dominating Ferrari's did Ross Brawn have a hand in designing? I think Byrne took most of it. Sure he was a master strategist at Ferrari but the strategy at Mercedes has generally sucked, the team's pit work is garbage and the cars are unreliable to boot. I might be taking a risk here but I think Brawn is done and if Mercedes can't win a WDC or WCC with the 2014 regs he should be sacked. In my opinion, even if his car manages to be the best at the start of the year, they won't be able to sustain it or they will take a retarded direction with development like this year's "understanding the tires."
Never said he did the design work, he was technical director and thus approved designs, ideas etc.... he was part of a team. If the team dont gel together it doesnt function. RB did most of the innotative work IMO but it had to be masterminded by the technical director.ie..Brawn Everybody is struggling with tyre choices and it affects the cars performance rather more than Pirelli / FIA want to admit.
I´d wait to the next year to see if he can do something with Mercedes or not. Till now he was trying to win with a small budget. Now that he has proven that he can´t and that he´s using the same method than everybody else (spending big money) let´s see if he gets into to the groove or not. This year after the first races they looked like they were almost there. I don´t know what went wrong from then on. In any case, I agree that the personality of the leader of a team is too often overestimated and that those who think that changing the boss is the solution for everything may have some fascistoid tendencies. ;-)
I hated the Postelthwaite cars .... they were always referred to as "mobile chicanes" by Murray Walker's offsider at the time (Hunt I think) Barnard was a sham Rory was the real deal, head to head with Newey he is the winner Root cause of Ferrari's problems are that the TEAM left early (TEAM=Todt, Brawn, Byrne and Michael)
The mobile chicanes Murray referred to was the 1982 126C2 a dog of a car and not a design by Harvey Postelthwaite. This had already been made by Ferrari prior to him arriving. Although Ferrari were very good a building strong powerful engines it was not geared up for chassis design, development and building. HP had to overcome this by sub contracting out the work. Read the history on Barnard before you cast the first stone, he was a brilliant engineer plaqued by in fighting within Ferrari. When asked to make complicated components they [ferrari] lacked the skills to do this, therefore they had to be built in the UK. His biggest mistake was that he wouldnt live in Italy, i quess his family came first... quite rightly but his final design the F310 nearly won the title. Remember it took Todt seven hard years to get a result Ferrari craved for.
Barnard produced nothing tangible towards a WDC and only succeeded in dividing the company's money pit, they were desperate and he knew he could get away with it ... is it any wonder it took the Italians so long to trust another, and I find it impossible to believe that anything he needed to be made could not be made in Italy, some of the best engineers and artisans in the world. Todt was the first link in LdM long term plan to put the scuderia at the pointy end of the grid, then came Brawn who got Byrne out of retirement (and Byrne was anything but impressed by the Barnard car) and finally Michael, and the WDC would have been in 1999 if MS had not crashed at Silverstone
The 126c2 would have won both titles easily if Villeneuve or Pironi had not crashed. Re: the F310, it was not a good car at all. Maybe you´re talking about the F310B of 1997. Yes, almost won the title, but how much credit Barnard really deserves for it? The car started the season only a bit better than his previous failures; only when Byrne and Co. developed it, it started to look like a title contender. The only Ferrari 100% Barnard that was a really good car was the 641. After that he made the Benetton (again it only became a winner after some Byrne development), a bunch of not so good Ferraris, the Arrows and the Prost (let´s not talk about those). I´d say that Barnard was good in the 80s and early 90s but from then on...
A great accomplishment as it had 4 different drivers (GV, Pironi, Tambay and Andretti) and in some races only one car was entered. Early season it was finding its' feet but by mid-season it was the class of the field.
Making Andretti one of the very few drivers who had another season/comeback with Ferrari. Berger being the other one I can think of.
He grabbed pole at Monza and finished third. I was there and was pissed that Ferraris came 2 and 3 to Arnoux in the Renault.
Any car in the 96 championship would have played second fiddle to the Williams car, it was totally dominant throughout the season, at least the F310 and schumacher scored a few victories unlike any other team. Its major set back was poor reliability, Irvine suffering the most with over 10 retirements, this was something that had plagued Ferrari for many years. You cannot blame it on Barnards design. the F310 development through the season gave results, Byrne developed it further with the F310B, had barnard stayed ...who knows it may have won the championship!! With the arrows and prost you over estimate Barnards involvement and his limitations regarding budget set by those 2nd rate teams.
It would have been interesting to see how Schumacher would have done had he stayed at Benetton another year and driven the B196. It still scored a large amount of podiums with Alesi and Berger driving adn they hated the handling since it was designed for Schumi's unusual style. I bet he could have contended for the championship in it.
Be nice now. The car was faster than any other or guys like Tambay and an aging Andretti could have never pulled off the WCC. Gilles and later Didier could have walked to the WDC with less red mist
The Prost actually was only half designed by Barnard, he dealed mainly with the rear half. Being made with two separate halves, it´s not a surprise that those cars did not work very well. The F310 was not only unreliable, it was also slow, Barnard took some wrong decisions regarding aerodynamics, specially in the nose and the driver´s head protections; he tried to minimize them with a new raised nose that they used in the second half of the season, but that was clearly a last minute fix. The F310B was still a Barnard design, and despite the name, it had nothing in common with the F310; not a bad car, but I think that Jean Todt knew exactly what was the problem with Barnard when he said that it´s difficult to solve problems by telephone. Maybe Barnard´s working method (having an independent design office away from the factory) did not work, and probably it´s not a coincidence that he had his best days before he started working that way, but that doesn´t mean that he was not a good designer. Actually I´ve read that Todt first tried to bring Barnard to Italy and only contacted Brawn and Byrne when he refused to.
Definately unreliable but not so slow as to get pole positions, wins and a few fastest laps, as i said before against the Williams that year nobody else got a look in. He did take a different route, same as Mclarens Neil Oatley who likewise wasnt totally convinced of the high nose concept. The split office didnt work one bit IMO and issues arose due to unreliable maching in Italy, composite design and manuafacture lay in the UK which is why Ferrari sought / wanted access into that market place. Todt realised that i think which is why he wanted the works to be in Italy, i also think JB was responsible for setting up some of the factory based manufacturing works but there was a skills shortage which is why people where trained in the UK at GTO. It did have a purpose.
A bit late to the party (too many other projects on the go!), but coming back to this: I've had the pleasure this season of being able to watch some of the free practice sessions live on the BBC, along with their race coverage (both live and highlights), and Gary Anderson has provided an excellent insight into the workings of the teams, the drivers and the cars. He doesn't do it by "just watching the car on tv" (unlike just about all the armchair experts who are posting about him!), he actually goes to different parts of the circuit to compare how the different cars react to various sections of track, how hard the drivers in each car are having to work, and he has an excellent eye for detail. He also talks to the designers and team members about their cars, and gets far more insight about them than anybody posting on here! He's been there and done that, and has real experience of F1 car design (how many on here can claim the same?), and yet he manages to explain incredibly complex F1 design concepts in terms that the average man can understand. Just because he doesn't design F1 cars for a living any more doesn't automatically mean that he no longer understands them!
I have to agree with this. Even then, it doesn´t mean much, as nobody here is a real expert nor get paid for their elucubrations. You will also notice that there´s a Massa sucks thread full of people than can´t drive better than Massa. But that doesn´t mean that Massa doesn´t suck compared with other drivers. The question I´d ask to Gary Anderson is: if he was able to understand the problem, and even suggest that it can be fixed in a week, how is possible that the top teams, with lots of people and computers and wind tunnels, have been being beaten by the Red Bulls these last two months? That doesn´t mean that he doesn´t know the business, or that he´s not a great communicator. And he can try to make an educated guess, but when he said that he´s 99.99% sure about where the problem is and that it can be fixed in a week, I think he was just talking for the sake of it.
I like Gary Anderson and his addition to the team, he did design the best looking F1 car in history. the 7up Jordan. With Jake Humphries reportedly moving on, the BBC with David Coullthard have a good team to continue without interuption. As for understanding aerodynamics, i remember what Frank costin once wrote....find out what the air wants to do and assist it, dont force it has it has a habit of not doing what you want. Most cars i see today are using big scoops to channel air. The coanda effect is a classic example of how air can be assistedto move in a direction you want Understanding what F1 aerodynamics are doing is not complicated, its having an understanding of aerodynamics to understand what to do, especiially with a clean sheet of paper in front of you.
That Harvey didn't design the 1982 126 C2 is incorrect I believe according to all I know and the book Ferrari: Turbo by Jonathon Thompson. GV27TIFOSI Image Unavailable, Please Login
I think Gary Anderson was a great signing! As I've previously said, he manages to explain some very complex issues in terms that the average race fan can understand and his knowledge of F1 concepts, tactics, car issues etc., etc., is superb! (I'm bracing Myself for SKY TV to steal him for their F1 coverage now! ) That makes perfect sense because if your trying to force the air to work rather than guiding it along a natural path then you're adding inefficiencies and small amounts of drag into your aero package. This part I cannot agree with!, understanding modern F1 aerodynamics I believe is incredibly complicated. In the "old days", an F1 cars aero package was quite simple: For the upper bodywork - make the car as smooth as possible so it slips through the air with minimal drag (highlighted by the absence of winglets, bargeboards and turning vanes etc.) Take a look at the Ferrari 640 and it's rivals of that era. For the underside of the car - accelerate the airflow as fast as possible in a straight line to create down force. This was all made simpler by the fact that the aero package was static - once set, that was it, it didn't change. Today though, things are far more complicated. The air is worked far harder over the car and it gets split into multiple directions at every opportunity. The engineers and aerodynamicists have discovered that you can make far more use of the air and gain big advantages by re-channelling it around the car. It's not a case of now trying to force the air to work harder though, it's a case of spreading the work load over more areas of the car with more complex guidance of the various air-flows. Just look at how complex the front wings are these days. Air gets channelled inside the front wheels, outside the front wheels, under the car, over the car, even through the car - and that's just the front wing! Look at the end-plate designs, the teams spend Millions on minor aero tweaks to the end-plates alone, looking to channel the air better for individual circuits. Then you've got rear wing designs, floor designs (complete with holes/slots etc., to guide air to the diffuser), barge-boards, side-pod designs, complex diffusers, complex suspension layouts, brake-duct design, aero brake-hubs, complex exhaust solutions, even the wheels are designed to assist with aero efficiency. Pirelli this year have even changed the side-wall profile of the front tyres in order to improve their aerodynamic stability, thus making the cars less nervous at the front end. And once you've got all that sorted? - then you add a complication by making the aero package variable by having a moving rear wing that can then upset the aero balance for split seconds! Understanding modern F1 car aerodynamics is more than just complicated, it's almost a black art these days!
