Barnard gained a diploma from Watford College of Technology in the 1960s before joining General Electric Company. In 1968 he moved to Lola Cars in Huntingdon as a junior designer, working on Formula Vee racers and sports car projects. At Lola he met Patrick Head, who would later co-found Williams; the two became close friends and Head served as best man at Barnard's wedding in the early 1970s.
In 1972, Barnard joined McLaren and spent three years working alongside Gordon Coppuck on the championship-winning M23 and the team's IndyCar programme. From 1975 he worked with Parnelli Jones on the VPJ4 Formula One car, which achieved a best finish of fourth with Mario Andretti at the 1975 Swedish Grand Prix. After that project wound down, Barnard redesigned the chassis for Indycar use, eventually producing the Chaparral 2K, which carried Johnny Rutherford to the 1980 Indianapolis 500 victory and the CART drivers' title.
Barnard's American success brought him to the attention of new McLaren principal Ron Dennis, and he joined the team in 1980 to develop the MP4/1 — the first Formula One car built around a carbon fibre composite monocoque. The chassis was manufactured by Hercules Aerospace in the United States after a search in England for a willing fabricator proved fruitless. The MP4/1's structural superiority was dramatically demonstrated at the 1981 Italian Grand Prix when John Watson survived a major accident at the second Lesmo corner without injury, silencing sceptics; rival teams were copying the design within months. Barnard also introduced the coke-bottle sidepod shape to Formula One in 1983, a form that remains standard today.
During his time at McLaren the team became comprehensively dominant. The TAG-Porsche V6 engine — financed by Mansour Ojjeh of Techniques d'Avant Garde and built by Porsche to Barnard's specification — debuted at the 1983 Dutch Grand Prix producing approximately 700 bhp and reached around 950 bhp by the end of its competitive life in 1987. Niki Lauda won the 1984 Drivers' title over Alain Prost by half a point, with the pair claiming 12 of the 16 races that season. Prost took the championship in 1985 and 1986. When Barnard departed for Ferrari at the end of 1986, his McLaren cars had accumulated 31 Grand Prix victories.
Barnard's move to Ferrari was announced before the 1986 German Grand Prix. Given considerable resources by the Scuderia, he established the Ferrari Guildford Technical Office in England in early 1988, reasoning that distance from Maranello would allow more focused design work and insulate the team from the attentions of the Italian press. The arrangement created friction, as did his decision to ban the traditional lunchtime wine for mechanics during testing. The cars he inherited — the Gustav Brunner-designed F1/87 and its successor — were not to his preferred specification, but he acknowledged little could be changed once construction had begun. Ferrari finished fourth in the 1987 Constructors' Championship and second in 1988, with Gerhard Berger winning the last two races of 1987 and the 1988 Italian Grand Prix.
The centrepiece of Barnard's Ferrari work was the electronic semi-automatic gearbox, operated via paddles on the steering wheel, which appeared on the 1989 Ferrari 640. Despite persistent fragility during an extended development period that made headlines in Italy, Nigel Mansell drove the 640 to victory on its race debut at the Brazilian Grand Prix. The reliability problems were resolved by the French Grand Prix, and the 640 added a Hungarian victory for Mansell and a Portuguese win for Berger in the second half of the season. Berger's rapid return to racing after suffering serious burns in a fiery crash at the 1989 San Marino Grand Prix — his car struck the Tamburello wall at close to 180 mph with a near-full fuel load — was attributed by both Berger and team principal Cesare Fiorio to the paddle-shift system, which allowed gear changes without gripping a traditional lever. By 1995 every Formula One team was running a version of the paddle-shift gearbox. Ferrari finished third in the 1989 Constructors' Championship.
Rather than continue at Ferrari alongside incoming driver Alain Prost, Barnard joined Benetton as Technical Director for 1990. He assisted chief designer Rory Byrne on the B190, which gave Nelson Piquet two late-season victories in Japan and Australia. The B191 that followed in 1991 carried Piquet to his 23rd and final Grand Prix win in Canada, while the B192 — completed with Byrne and Ross Brawn — saw Michael Schumacher claim his first Formula One victory in Belgium. Barnard left Benetton after a financial dispute with team principal Flavio Briatore.
After a brief period on the stillborn Toyota Formula One project, Barnard returned to Ferrari in mid-1993, founding Ferrari Design and Development (FDD) in Surrey. From that office he designed the 412T1B, which returned Berger to the top step of the podium, and the 412T2, which gave Jean Alesi his only Formula One victory. By 1996, with Jean Todt building a new technical structure in Maranello, Barnard's position became untenable. Unwilling to relocate to Italy, he designed one final car — the 1997 F310B — before FDD was purchased from Ferrari and renamed B3 Technologies, ending his long association with the Scuderia. The F310B nonetheless took Schumacher within reach of the Drivers' title, his Japanese Grand Prix victory being the last win for a Barnard-designed car.
B3 Technologies contracted to Arrows in 1998, with Pedro Diniz scoring the last championship points for a fully Barnard-designed car in that year's chaotic Belgian Grand Prix. The outfit also worked with the Prost team until its closure in 2001, after which Barnard became Technical Director of the Team KR Grand Prix motorcycle racing team. On 29 February 2008 he sold B3 Technologies and moved into furniture design with leading designer Terence Woodgate; B3 Technologies entered administration later that year. A biography, The Perfect Car by Nick Skeens, was published in 2018 with Barnard's close cooperation.
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