Bridgestone's Suganuma reviews 2005

Bridgestone's Technical Manager Hisao Suganuma believes 2005 has been a bigger challenge than winning the last six world titles with Ferrari as the company looks towards a winter of intensive testing for 2006.

The Japanese tyre manufacturer partnered Ferrari to third place in the Constructors' World Championship with Michael Schumacher securing the same position in the Drivers' standings.
Hisao Suganuma, Technical Manager "Because we were not winning the races it was more difficult. We had to try to turn things around so we tried a lot of things, more than previous years' efforts. I would say from that point of view it has been lots of hard work this year, but we can use this experience. Although we lost this year, we have good data for the future."

Ferrari took a single race win this year at the United States Grand Prix in June and had to settle with third place as its rivals gained the upper hand. But Bridgestone believe they and Ferrari can learn from this more difficult year and Suganuma is confident that a winter of testing will put them in a strong position when the new season begins next March.
"I would say next year we will come back. It depends on the regulations but when they are finalised we can apply this year's experience to that and then we can find a much better direction than this year."
New regulations that ruled out tyre changes during the races were introduced at the start of the year and that made it difficult for Bridgestone to continue their long run of success into 2005. The company suffered a tough start to the season because, Suganuma believes, their winter testing did not show up crucial information on their tyre wear patterns. The company developed an intelligent prediction method during the 2005 season, which enabled their teams to move closer to the front during the 19 races throughout the year.

"The most difficult point of this season was the tyres having to last the full race distance. That meant tyre wear was a big issue in choosing the right specification. Initially we really struggled to choose the right compound for the race. But it is really difficult to separate what was wrong with the compound and the construction. Even with the construction we can help to save tyre wear, so I would say we had room to improve in all areas. But we worked very hard to make good predictions for tyre wear. The technical centre developed a very good method to predict the compound wear for each circuit and then from the fourth race of the year, in Imola onwards, we used that method to predict the wear of the compound. Then we were able to make a good estimation and that allowed us to choose what compound range was needed for each Grand Prix. That method kept improving with each race result, so the accuracy of the prediction got better and better. I would say the wear prediction method we developed was quite a big benefit for thinking about the future races, so together we did a lot of analysis about the relationship between compound and track surface. Those things are good, although we didn't have good success for the race results we can learn quite a lot from these matters. I think what we learned this year could be a good asset for the future."