Misa1 sanoi:
...kaikki ne muut kuskit jotka ovat McLarenilla pärjänneet ovat varsin tyytyväisiä uraansa McLarenilla, Kekestä ja Prostista lähtien
Kausi 1986:
Full quote from Christopher Hilton's book - with the quotes from Rosberg and Barnard.
Rosberg crashed the car in testing in Rio which did not exactly endear him to Barnard. 'I am not' Rosberg says defensively - or as defensively as he will ever get - 'very well known for crashing cars and I hadn't done many laps when it got away from me at the long corner because the car was just so different from what I was used to. If you ask me what my memory of McLaren year was, it was understeer with capital letters. I got the chassis right three times, the Brands Hatch test in June, the German Grand Prix and Australia.
I got on with Prost very well because I was naive enough not to get into politics and look at what was going on. Afterwards I believe - without ever having discussed this with anybody - that I was testing all the management systems for the new TAG eninge. I can't find any other explanation for why I didn't finish so many of the races and Alain did. I know we had some new sensors. I was running second in Austria and the sensors failed.
I finished five races that year out of sixteen. Niki had finished three the year before and Prost wins the Championship both years. That didn't change our relationship because I was so convinced the team were doing the best they could except they wouldn't change the chassis the way I felt I wanted it and I would expected a little bit more, not support, but guidance from Alain.
Everytime I asked him : "Would you go through there with a car understeering so much?", he said "Yes". I didn't do anything about it but he knew it killed me. That's a hard thing to say but every time he would be quicker. Alain is a very clever guy, which I had never been in that way, he did the right thing. I would never have done it. That's my problem.
I was the new boy, he was winning races and when I said they'd got to do something about the understeer they didn't because Alain was still winning races. If Alain had said it they would have done it, so therefore you must be a little bit careful about saying it's hard. It isn't. Alain wasn't listening for it.
There's another thing. Alain's driving style is unique. The way he entered corners, especially in the turbo-charged era, was completely different to anybody else. There was maybe one guy who used a similar technique and that was Niki. The technique was entering very, very deep into the corners, braking into the corners where the classic racing driver brakes on the straight, slows the car and flicks into the corner - you always brake in a straight line - but with his feel and confidence he would brake into the corner. The way I braked you couldn't turn the steering wheel, it woudn't turn. He felt and fed the brakes into the corner, I'd hit them so hard they'd be just before the limit of where wheels lock. I once made a concerted effort to drive just like him but I couldn't, in the same way that I'm right-handed and I just can't write with my left. That's a similar kind of change.
If a car understeers for you it understeers for you. You can try it backwards, forwards, sideways, whatever and it understeers for you. It was so dominant that I would say the whole year I only used 75 per cent of my potential in the car.'
We're back to tensions.
'This', Barnard says, 'is Keke having a go at me. There was a time when we went testing at Brands and I said, "Right, I'm going to do whatever it takes to make it work the way you want." We went up and up and up on the front suspension. What Keke wanted was the front end stiff, not moving, enough bite aerodynamically to make it turn, yank the steering wheel fast and hard and the front goes pop, turns in and your boot is back on the power. It was very, very difficult to do that and keep the back end in. You could get the front to work like that but the back would step out and before you knew where you were you were going backwards into the fence.
On top of all that I never felt it was right. I always wanted the car to drive off the back wheel. The thing that John Watson, for example, liked was a tremendously rearward center of pressure and a car which was completely glued at the back, very sensitive at front so you could come into a corner, turn the steering wheel and the car stayed glued while it turned in off the back wheel. With Rosberg it was the other way around : "I want to come in, brake as hard as I can, yank the front in and the back has got to follow." The way our aerodynamics had derived we just couldn't do it. Prost could drive it like that..
Keke tried to copy Prost, that was the amazing thing. We talked about it and said, "Well you can drive it like Alain because fundamentally I think it's a better racing car the way it is." But Keke could not seem to cope with the careful turn-in. You get a Prost set-up car, a guy comes along and tries to jam it into the corner, jumps on the brakes, down goes the front, whoops, the centre of pressure is immediately thrown to the front and round comes the back.
Alain was able to lead it in, gently bring it in, turn the wheel gently enough. You've got to remember we're talking here about such fine limits, such fine changes that you could stand and watch and you'd have a hell of a job to see any difference on the track - but Alain was able to get it into the corner and then open the throttle, boom, and that's it, he was away, gone.
I suppose the root problem was that I still didn't feel what Keke wanted was right : running a car with that much of a forward centre of pressure just to make the front end work, because you had effectively wrecked the car mechanically.
It ended up with Keke and me in different directions. It's so personal, the whole thing's about interactions between people, driver to engineer, engineer to his engineer, to mechanics, the management, it's all about personal relationships. If a bloke says something has got to be black and you say you understand but it's got to be white, at the end of the day you can like the guy, you can have a good tiime, you can go out to dinner with him but fundamentally you think : that guy is wrong. And he is thinking : you are wrong. A compromise? This is the old problem, isn't it? How many compromises do you make in this business and get away with? The less, the better off you are.'
