BAR in Trouble

[Crash and Burn]

BAR is in trouble.

Moral is at an all time low and it doesn't help matters with Vill. going around telling people it sucks. Pollock has admited that things are bad.

Rumours have it that they might not be here next year as BAR.

[steve nielsen]

Yep, I heard they had a loss of 20 million $ last year.........

Maybe the new Red Bull team??

[f1manoz]

BAR are in deep trouble at the moment, and this may be the best time for Honda to buy the team. BUT, with Sato joining Jordan, would Honda join forces with Jordan and give up a chance of having their own F1 team by taking over BAR?

If Honda decide on joining Jordan only as an engine supplier, then BAR will be up the duff, with no engine manufacturers wanting to enter in there near future (that VW thing has been round for ages now so I'll disregard that.)

[I Ate Yoko Ono]

But everyone forgets BAR are equalling Jordan in the WCC this year. Jordan should be ashamed - they have been around for over a decade treading water and not moving forwards (distinctly backwards since 1999 in fact).

Jordan truly are the DC of teams with EJ's annual "next year we will be fighting for victories at every race" speech....no, honest, we will....

BAR may have low morale etc but they have already matched a team with over triple the experience. Additionally, BAR have a stronger driver line up for next year, my money is on them over Jordan and I think morale will improve when they move towards sealing the works Honda deal.

[Airhead]

BAR in trouble?

Is Ralf gunna drive for them next year?

[Bononi]

...and Ron Dennis their new boss.

[Aysedasi]

I've no problem with the drivers, I'm sure JV has still got it and OP is much better than usually given credit for. The engine should be OK. Its the rest of the package that seems to leave much to be desired.... It seemed to go downhill from the moment they dreamed up that ridiculous double-sponsorship colour-scheme!!

[BootsOntheSide]

Serious reorganisation is needed at BAR, although if they're already developing next eyar's car they must be getting somewhere. I'm sure the car will be good and capable fo top 6 finishes, and with any luck Jacques will be back on form, as ahving frequently put last year's car where it shouldn't've been, he's been very lacklustre this season.

[Bononi]

If BAR repeat what they did early this years, they should get out of F1. Ask EERO about the insides of BAR this year, what a lack of professionalism...

[EERO]

Originally posted by Bononi
If BAR repeat what they did early this years, they should get out of F1. Ask EERO about the insides of BAR this year, what a lack of professionalism...

I asked him, but he didn't know anything.

[Bononi]

Originally posted by EERO


I asked him, but he didn't know anything.

It wasn't you EERO ? Uhn... my memories are not working well. Can you remember a topic about the lack of professionalism at BAR ? Who was the guy who gave us some info about that ????

[I Ate Yoko Ono]

Originally posted by EERO

"I asked him, but he didn't know anything."

You may not know anything, but you'll always be my EERO.

[EERO]

Originally posted by Bononi


It wasn't you EERO ? Uhn... my memories are not working well. Can you remember a topic about the lack of professionalism at BAR ? Who was the guy who gave us some info about that ????

I'm flattered Bon, maybe I repeated something I had read, but I cannot presume to have any inside knowledge.

I8YO,

If you start singing "The Wind Beneath my Wings", I will hunt you down and replace all of your CD's with Barry Manilow 8 tracks.

[Bononi]

Originally posted by EERO

I'm flattered Bon, maybe I repeated something I had read, but I cannot presume to have any inside knowledge.

Ok, EERO. I was wrong it wasn't really you who said that.

But I'm happy that I can remember that someone did it ! It was Dino IV (sounds logical).

Here it is : http://tentenths.com/forum/showthrea...threadid=10002

Originally posted by Dino IV
You're welcome, guys. Sharing info is what we're here for too, right?
I don't think Reynard has much to do with it directly. BAR is located in Brackley and they run their team like most of the other teams do. Reynard probably provided a handful of engineers, but designing the parts will be independent from other Reynard activities I guess.

I didn't mean to burn down the BAR design as a complete failure, but just to indicate that they have some not-so-easy-to-solve problems. The Ferrari and McLaren are aerodynamically the most extensively elaborated designs so they have sorted out things at best. Behind that everyone more or less has some design problems.
BAR has some severe ones, but Jordan on their part has been a little too extreme with their reduction of cooling intakes\exhausts and thus might run into problems as well at some hot racing days.
Williams did design their chassis, splitter and undertray for maximum exploit of their reg-loophole, which the FIA closed so cowardly when the FW23 performance showed to be more than their script expected. So Williams had to adept their undertray as best as they could, but aren't able to do much at the chassis except of some fine-tuning of the splitter's shape and position. Further back in the field, aero-problems increase with Jag needing a fully new aeropackage, Prost and Sauber in some minor problems, Benetton in huge problems closing their downforce deficit and Arrows in trouble as well, although the impeccable Brunner-designed Minardi is lifting the aero-stakes in the back of the field ofcourse.

What really struck me the most from what this BAR-guy told, was actually the lack of professionalism which I really didn't expect in F1 anno 2001. He was in full charge of the design process but pointed out, that they went ahead with a certain plan they came up with, designed the car and then were struck with surprises when every team presented their cars and they actually saw the solutions everyone else came up with. That really showed there's hardly any research, any scientific approach in the car design, but more or less the same basic principle as half a century ago when the experienced car designers sat together and discussed their ideas and decided what seems to be a good idea, system or shape and take it from there. Today they say they don't have time to be very extensive in their research towards the best solutions, so that old design principle really never changed into a more scientific approach. That's not what I thought I have to admit. I really thought that designing the car with so many people, money, computing power, data acquisition and testing facilities would have changed fundamentally, but it obviously didn't change much in it's basic principles, just in the techniques used.

For instance I asked why the BAR and Jordan differed so much although running the same engine. With the Jordan featuring a very pointed nose, radical frontwing, small sidepods, chimney-fins and periscopes, the BAR had none of those. He answered that they noticed all the differences at season start and tried i.e. some 40 McLaren style chimney configurations and didn't think any of those would solve any of their problems so refrained from using them. They changed to periscopes some GP's ago, but can't do much about the sidepods and nose because the chassis needs to be changed then and that was impossible mid-season. I didn't want to be rude so didn't ask why they opted for that frontwing and nose in the first place when someone like Brunner from pictures alone could tell it wasn't a good design, but I was really stunned by the lack of arguments for chosing directions in the design process. Most 'innovations' alledgedly come from just looking at the other cars (he mentioned copying by taking a series of different angle photographs) and trying to see what could be a valuable idea to copy to your car. Copycat galore ...

At BAR they know now the problems their design has come up with at different tracks and you see how they're franticly trying to improve things with some modifications. They feature small triangular shapes next to and under the nose which need to generate vortices flowing under the car in front of the sidepods. You don't see those on most of the other cars because their nose and frontwing designs obviously are more efficient in achieving the same without those vortex generators, which are really first-aid bandages in aero design. Fact is though that they run their windtunnel for 18 hours a day, 6 days a week, gathering so much data they scan through some of it roughly and archiving the rest on CD-Roms and storing them in an archive to never be looked at again. And still come up with designs which seem to be not properly working. Something is going wrong in the process wouldn't you say?

Makes you think. You probably all know the story of John Barnard who insisted of getting away from Maranello's everyday F1 hectic when he worked for Ferrari some years ago. He wanted and got his Ferrari Design & Development center in England and the basic idea behind it was that the engineers could focus entirely on new developments, on thorough research of new designs and really focus soleley on the new car for the next season. His argument was that the engineering department in Maranello never got to do that work because it was only 'ad hoc' jumping in on problems which arised with the running car, modifying and upgrading it from GP to GP, wasting valuable time. He wanted it to be a think tank, to improve the design process and really take things to another level. Knowing Barnard's impeccable status inside the F1 engineering community, the dozens of features he designed, still the majority of which is being used and implemented in every F1-car design today and the BAR story above, he has proven to be right about the FDD-concept. Unfortunately the Todt reorganization of Ferrari didn't acknowledge this at the time, but hopefully in the future we'll see the return of design offices like FDD, really lifting F1 to a next level in the way they're designing cars.