Pat Symonds on Senna, Schumacher, Alonso

Rory Byrne had been instrumental in selecting Symonds as his replacement at Royale and now the man who Pat would come to consider his mentor was instrumental in his move to F1. Formula 2 champion in 1980, Toleman was stepping up to the big time in 1981 and Byrne wanted Symonds there to assist him. “Alex Hawkridge told me all about their plans and said they wanted me to be part of it. I wasn’t totally sure but the clincher came when he said the deal included a brand-new Golf GTI. I said ‘See you there on Monday.’

“Our ambition outweighed our naïveté by such a huge amount. Going into F1 in the era of the DFV, why would you not do that while you learned? But no, we said we don’t want to do that, turbos are the way forward. We were even toying with doing a carbon-fibre chassis that first year. On top of that, because Toleman had been so successful with Pirelli in F2, they thought we might as well use their tyres as well. The idea that 13-inch wheels were right? No, no, we’ll do 16s. Wow, did we take on something. Meanwhile Brian Hart was doing a turbo engine on about a fiver a week. Just madness.”

It took until the final race of the season before the car even qualified, but over the next couple of years the new boys progressed. Symonds effectively ran the race team from early in ’82 while Byrne got on with a new car. “We introduced our first carbon-fibre car at Monza in ’82. We had a tweak to the underside of the monocque that was so good we decided not to put it on the car for the last two races, because we didn’t want anyone else to see it. We felt come 1983 it was going to be amazing, but then F1 went flat-bottomed. But we applied some wonderful lateral thinking to that flat-bottomed car and this team that still hadn’t scored any points, and didn’t qualify for every race, went to Rio for the first test in ’83 and was fastest. The reason was we just had loads more downforce than anyone else. But the downforce was incredibly sensitive, a really difficult car to set up. But if you had two weeks of testing you could do it and it would just fly. Everyone was suddenly looking at us and a lot of the little tweaks we’d done – like going out to the full 140cm wing width forward of axle centre line – was copied by the next race. Which is the way it was in those days. You didn’t get protested, you got copied. I loved it like that. That car was actually semi-competitive but remained very, very difficult to set up because it had a front radiator and huge underwings beneath the radiator on a full width nose, making it very ride height-sensitive.”

But that TG183 gained Toleman its first points and put it on an upward trajectory that made it an attractive berth for Senna in his F1 rookie season, especially as the Pirellis had been exchanged for Michelins. “With Ayrton, it was the first time I saw that there was something different in a real elite sportsman. Obviously he had ability by the bucketful but it was more than that. It was the first time I’d met a driver that didn’t need to use his entire brain to drive the car and had plenty of capacity left to think about what was going on. This was enormously valuable in an era before data recording. He could tell you what the water temperature was, what the revs were in each corner. Most drivers simply couldn’t do that and it was difficult enough to get them to figure out what the revs were at the end of the straight.

“Just before Barnard joined I’d actually done Benetton’s first active car. I didn’t get on particularly well with John and when he wanted to know about it I more or less said, ‘Find out for yourself.’ We spent a year at Reynard without the pressure of racing, designing the car, developing the active suspension, even made a start on four-wheel steering. It was a lovely experience because, as an engineer, you’re constantly asking yourself questions but you never have time to answer them. But in ’91 we did. And we spent a total of just £750,000. We also found an old quarry in Enstone and got planning permission to build a factory. But designing the car was one thing, racing it would have been another. We needed someone to pay for the engine and even then it would’ve been a struggle. But just as we were arriving at the point where we were having to fold it, Flavio and Barnard had fallen out.”

The Barnard interlude had physically split Benetton’s infrastructure, some of it Barnard’s, some the team’s. While that was disentangled, Byrne, Symonds and their group – having been re-hired by Briatore – set up temporary base at Tom Walkinshaw’s nearby TWR factory to turn the aborted Reynard into the 1992 Benetton. This link resulted in Walkinshaw becoming a Benetton director. It was this that brought the step-change Briatore had been seeking with Barnard, changing the dynamic of the team fundamentally, injecting into it not only his notoriously hard-nosed approach to finding ways around regulations, but also the talents of his designer Ross Brawn. At the design-engineering level it meshed beautifully, with a Brawn-Byrne-Symonds combination adding up to at least the sum of its parts. Critically, Walkinshaw and Brawn also had first-hand experience of just how very special the young sports car ace Michael Schumacher was. This was central to his – highly controversial – recruitment to Benetton.

“It was immediately apparent how special he was Schumacher was.”

“It was immediately apparent how special he was,” says Pat. “But beyond his skills as a driver, I just grew to love the guy in every respect. We developed together. We moved into that electronic age together and both knew how to exploit it. I think we had complete trust in each other and on top of that, in my mind he was one of the nicest guys I ever worked with.”

Symonds’ specialisation, going right back to the Ford days, was vehicle dynamics. Ever since working on that quick but peaky 1983 Toleman, he’d played a key part at conception and development stages in making Byrne’s designs all about accessible performance, benign aerodynamics and driveability. Symonds quickly came to realise that Schumacher’s skills opened up new possibilities. “Michael was able to drive a car much closer to the stability limit than any of his peers. Whether it’s a car or a jet fighter, if you can drive near the stability limit you get great response and performance. That was his strength. We didn’t design the car around Michael; we weren’t that clever. But we did set it up around him. So the car was really quite oversteery and no one else could drive it like that.”

The abolition of active suspension and other electronic gizmos for 1994 suddenly made Benetton’s benign aerodynamics philosophy a much better fit than the more aggressive aero platforms that active suspension had allowed and which had been pursued by Adrian Newey at Williams. The initial ’94 Williams as driven by Senna was a handful. The B194 Benetton, driven by Schumacher, could run rings around it. Plus the re-introduction to F1 of refuelling meant the team’s TWR-honed race strategy skills left the competition clay-footed and history played out as it did, with the death of Senna and Schumacher’s title amid the controversy of Benetton’s ‘option 13’ traction control. “Because Tom was involved everyone assumed he was cheating. I’m pretty certain we weren’t. I went through the data with the FIA inspector and he accepted that actually the start in question was actually quite mediocre – it was just better than the poor starts of the two cars ahead of it. But there was a political situation between Flavio and Max Mosley. In Spain that year Flavio had come into the motorhome saying, ‘That’s it. That’s the last we’ll be hearing of Max Mosley,’ which was a dangerous statement to make. Whatever that was all about was at the heart of the politics between them. I still scrutinise myself and think, ‘If someone was really clever, could they have been cheating but kept it from me?’ Possibly, but I went through so much data I’m sure I’d have known.

“Fernando was incredibly competitive, had the same total self-esteem of Ayrton and Michael. They know they are the best. He was a great racer, not quite as outright quick as Michael, maybe, but still very, very quick. At the times I worked with them I’d say Michael was the quickest, then Fernando, then Ayrton. But it was Ayrton’s first year and I’m sure people that worked with him when he was winning championships would disagree with that assessment.

“If the car wasn’t quite there Fernando sometimes wouldn’t give quite everything. As a team player he let himself down on occasion and I never formed the bond with him that I did with Michael – no one on the team did. He was a bit of a loner and that’s carried on into other teams. He was well very suited to that era of sprints because he was so relentless. But don’t under-estimate his ability to adapt. In the right car he could still win titles. When he was with us he had a quite distinctive driving style – he’d put in very rapid steering inputs. He doesn’t do that these days and so maybe it was a car or tyre characteristic. He used to wait late before going towards the apex and then very rapidly and aggressively push the car in. That was his way of killing that mid-corner understeer that’s inherent in an F1 car.”

Unfortunately the parallels with Schumacher extended to Alonso leaving after securing the second title and the fall in the team’s competitiveness that followed – even after Alonso returned in 2008. From that and the car industry downturn came the pressure upon Briatore from Renault and the unfortunate saga of Singapore 2008.