Nearly – but not quite. That sums up Benetton in the early 1990s. The close-knit team based in a patchwork of industrial units in Witney was established as Ford’s factory-powered squad and through Flavio Briatore’s marketing hustle from 1989 boasted a decent budget, with limited but consistent support from the Italian ‘woolly jumper company’ that owned it. Yet it always seemed to be a pretender tapping on the glass ceiling of success, with only the odd crack to show for its efforts. Despite the potential sum of its considerable parts, would Benetton ever crash through and beat the established McLaren/Williams hegemony?
The game-changer was supposed to be John Barnard. But the revered designer behind McLaren’s mid-1980s glory and the near-miss Ferrari revival of 1989/90 had blown through Benetton in a fury in little more than 18 months. What a disappointment. Yet the short, explosive Barnard era did shake the team from comfortable complacency and triggered a chain of events that led directly to the team’s mid-1990s golden era.
Thirteen engineers, including designer Rory Byrne and engineering chief Pat Symonds, had walked out in protest at Barnard’s ‘my way or the highway’ approach. By the end of 1991, Byrne and Symonds were back – and quickly gelled with a new senior recruit
