Motorsport is a ‘people’ sport, a melee of friendships and rivalries, personal and professional.
Whilst many names are well-known, others are not, but many of these people are beloved figures in the motorsport community.
Today, at Silverstone, we say farewell to one such man, Ian Barnwell, known to all as ‘Barny’. A giant in the vital and much-misunderstood field of global logistics.
Barny passed away in the UAE late last year after a short illness, news of his death spread through the motorsport community like wildfire, and the grief was tenable.
We could, and briefly will, reflect on his relevance to the DSC story. He was an early sponsor of its predecessor sites SportscarWorld and SuperSportscarWorld, an ever-present in the paddock that was always up for a natter, always pushing on behalf of his clients, always with a tale or looking for the latest juicy gossip.
But, much more importantly, his contribution to making motorsport happen, and doing so whilst staying as the unique individual that he was, will be missed.
And there is no better way of explaining what that contribution was, and what made him tick than to talk to his best friend.
The DSC Editor caught up with Richard Dean at Daytona, where the United Autosport Orecas – including the eventual class-winning ar – carried tributes to Barny – and we agreed that today is the day for the stories to be told.
As DSC sets up in Qatar, several members of the WEC paddock have delayed their departure for the season opener to pay their respects and remember Barny. They’ll be joined by many, many others from all around the sport and beyond at an event that will see tears and laughter in equal measure.
Barny would be amused by the irony that all of us believe he went far too early, after a life lived getting things to far-flung places on time, or dealing with the challenges of getting there late. “Early’ was not a word that featured often!
Over to you Deany:
“When anybody loses a close friend, it’s tough, isn’t it? But we were really close.
“You get to know a few people in a work environment or friend environment, but with Barny, it was both. He did an awful lot for me as a driver, and he did a lot for my team, and he did a lot to make my life better and more fun.
“When you look back at life you remember people that gave you an opportunity, or gave you a lift, a leg up.
“And Barny was absolutely one of them. When I was struggling just to stay racing full time, and I was right on the verge of: ‘Do I quit? Don’t I quit?’ He was always pushing me to continue.
“His company, FirstAir was a successful company. But he probably spent an awful lot more supporting people and me than he should have done.
“He wasn’t a wealthy enough man to put as much into motor racing as he probably did. But he did, and when I was making a transition from Formula 3 to F3000 and from single-seaters to sports cars. He knew the sports car paddock because he was pretty much shipping everybody around the world. So he gave me some introductions.
“He was a big supporter of mine. These teams have got a lot of good choices of drivers, and you’re there trying to get chosen, and you need something different.
“Some drivers have got a little bit of backing, and some people don’t. And I didn’t have any sponsorship, but Barny would always sort of do a deal on freight for somebody if they put me in the car just to give me an opportunity, to get the door open and get me in the seat.
“The first time I ever drove around Daytona was in a Lister Storm for Lawrence Pierce and Barny got me in the seat because he was doing all Lawrence’s freight.
“After that of course it was down to me to do well enough to keep the opportunity.
“But beyond that, when I did the American Le Mans Series in 2000/ 2001 he was doing so much, so many of the UK and European teams freight. But he would pay for my flights and hotels and things like that.
“That’s how I got to know him so well. Because he was such a contradiction. In his job of freight, you need to be structured and organized. But in his home, and in his personal life, he was totally the opposite to that. It was just chaos!
“So organizing his own hotel would be secondary, and you’d only find out when he’d say, ‘Yeah, Deany, don’t worry about it. I’ll sort your hotel out.’ You’d only realize when you got off the flight and ask which rental car company we were with he’d almost inevitably reply? ‘I don’t know. Let’s just go pick one.’
“What about the hotel? ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll find something.’
“And so it was. It was chaotic, but it was often a huge amount of fun. Because situations like that are where really great stories come out. And it’s only now that he’s gone that you realise it.
“I’ve got hundreds of Barny stories, most of them, you wouldn’t believe.
“He was well known in the paddock for getting people out of trouble. Freight hadn’t arrived. They’ve had an engine blow up and they needed to ship one overnight, whatever. It seemed he could solve anything. He was incredible. He could get people out of the shit.
“BUT, he got me in the shit so many times. And those stories are what makes a real friendship. We just clicked. We travelled everywhere, every race event that he was at.
“Much later the tables were turned because my office was booking his hotel, so he was always staying in our hotel. Whether it’s a dinner, a drive ate at night back from the track, a bar we passed on the way, wherever and whatever, I have an indelible series of memories of him, some repeatable, some entirely unrepeatable at pretty much every circuit I go to.
“His passions were aeroplanes and racing cars. And he made a business out of it by shipping racing cars, flying racing cars around the world.
“Before I met him, he was sponsoring Robb Gravett in the British Touring Car Championship, in the Ford Sierra RS500 and, coincidentally, we just restored that car.
“Barny had shipped the car from Australia (a Dick Johnson Racing-built car) and then did a deal with Gravett to sponsor his effort.
“We restored the car at United a couple of years ago and when it was almost done I got to put the FirstAir sticker on it which was a nice moment.
“He was shipping Group C cars around the world. He had an awful lot of the business of Group C when it was in its heyday.
“When he started to make a bit of money, he decided to buy himself a car to drive to race. And he bought a Rover (Tomcat) turbo. Sadly though, he was awful in it. I went to coach him in it, and, eventually, he just said, ‘yeah, well, you have a go in it Deany, because there’s something wrong with it.’
“I said: ‘There’s something wrong with it because you hit every barrier!’ So he asked me to drive it. We did a race at Oulton Park in the Rover Turbo Championship and we won both races.
“He loved that. And from there it was like, ‘Let’s go. Let’s just do it for a full season. Just have some fun. What’s what’s more fun than that?’
“So that was the very start of Team FirstAir, we won the Championship! We won nearly half the races, there was a pole position award and we won that too!
“We just had such an amazing fun season, and he loved it. And he threw everything into it.
“I moved on to other things but he kept at it. He did the Renault Spider Trophy with James Rhodes.
“That led to him meeting Rob Bell, and him starting a Formula Renault team. It became such a serious part of his life that it played second fiddle to the freight forwarding business and he sold the company.
“As in his old business he wanted the very best for his team, the best kit, the best people, he was a stickler for it. But he was just terrible with sponsors and people. And at that level, you need to have drivers in with drivers’ families and dads and managers.
“It just wasn’t ever going to work with him. He would just not entertain somebody’s dad telling him anything about the team or a manager. And there were definitely no airs and graces about how he would go about it. Diplomat, not in the slightest.
“If he disagreed with somebody’s dad, he would tell them to ‘f*** off’ and then he’d be wondering why they haven’t come back for the next weekend. He much preferred to run people he liked, and that gave the likes of me, Rob Bell, and loads of others, opportunities that we otherwise just wouldn’t have got.
“So running a racing team on a commercial basis was always going to be difficult!
“He then went to work for A1 GP and ran their whole freight management operation, everything, all the shipping around the world. More adventures, more stories, an incredible guy.
“He helped a lot of teams, doing deals for them, but he was always in the paddock, so mostly his help was doing the impossible, solving problems.
“He was the ultimate problem solver. That was partly because of his character, which was an almost total disregard for what we all might see as regulations that may be insurmountable, that he felt that he could navigate, steamroller or whatever.
“I’ve watched him do it and it was a thing of wonder to see barriers tumble and the impossible solved by pure force of will!
“More than anything on the front I remember his sense of care and duty. Quite often, when he had a last-minute cargo, a car that he was shipping out and it was late and it needed to be there, would put it on a flight, and he’d get on that flight. He would see it on and off and through customs.
“I remember him doing that for a Lister Storm going to Laguna Seca. I remember being at Los Angeles, airport with him at the cargo site, as this car had been unloaded, and they wouldn’t release it because it just didn’t have quite the right paperwork. And he sat in an office there and must have been there four hours where he just wore them down, totally wore them down to get it released.
“It was eventually a case of just, please go. Just go, take the car, leave the office, just go. That was his sort of technique quite often.
“He was just relentless with achieving stuff like that.
“There’s a reasonable chance that if a team has had a major crisis at Le Mans, or in the WEC, that you remember, that he played a part in solving it to get a team back on track. Very often he didn’t do it for money either, he was just passionate about it.
“If there was one thing he loved more than aeroplanes and racing it was Chelsea Football Club – he was totally passionate about it, and I’m a massive Leeds United fan. We always had an almost sibling rivalry, there was always an argument, and there was always a bet with a forfeit for the loser in a fun argument.
“He was really stubborn and he always thought he knew what was right or wrong in an argument. Sometimes he’d be right, but not very often!
“So I was always very confident to have him a bet or a forfeit when he dug in. We had a bet over one weekend when he came up to Leeds.
“He was a generational Chelsea fan, he was a Chelsea season ticket holder, his dad, Chelsea season ticket holder, his grandfather etc. etc. Leeds and Chelsea have a history and are not very ‘compatible’, but we even had a bet on that. So every time Leeds and Chelsea played, I’d go to Stamford Bridge and sit with him, he’d come to Elland Road and sit with me, and whoever lost whatever bet we had that day would be buying dinner.
“But we had another bet. One weekend, he caught a train up. I picked him up. We argued in the car, and came up with a bet that if he lost, you’d have to wear a full Leeds kit. If I lost, I’d have to wear a Chelsea kit all weekend, and he lost!
“So we went to the Leeds United club shop, and bought him a full kit. I took him all around Leeds. It happened to be gay pride that weekend as well, so he ended up walking through central Leeds with the gay pride parade, and he was in full Leeds kit – at the restaurant, at the Leeds game. I got photos of him, which were sent to all his friends and Chelsea family!
“He hated it. He absolutely hated it, which I obviously loved – but he eventually saw the funny side! That was Barny.”
And that, all of that, is why Barny was special. A laser focused pro in his field that never, ever stopped remembering how tough, and how much fun, our sport is.
Thanks for everything Barny, Bon Voyage.
