Bridgestone confident for 2006 season

Bridgestone's Technical Manager Hisao Suganuma is confident that the Japanese tyre manufacturer can react positively to the re-introduction of mid-race tyre changes in the 2006 Formula One season. The new season starts in March, in Bahrain.

The sport's governing body, the FIA, made the decision to bring tyre changes back at a meeting in late October leaving little more than four months for the competing tyre companies to prepare their products for the new season.

Hisao Suganuma,Technical Manager, however, is not concerned and said: "We can react for that regulation change and with this experience we have a very good database for the future, so we can apply that experience to any regulation change."

This season proved challenging for Bridgestone but they were still able to work with Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro to achieve third place in the Constructors' World Championship and take Michael Schumacher to third place in the Drivers' Championship.

The company continually developed their tyre design, together with Ferrari, through a system they developed to predict tyre wear on different track surfaces.

And Suganuma is confident they will be able to adapt that technique to accurately predict the wear they can expect with the new wave of short-life tyres for 2006.
"With tyre changes during the race coming back one set of tyres does not have to last for a full race distance, but our prediction of wear rates we can apply to the short distance race tyre as well. We have a more accurate way to choose the right tyre, so I am happy to deal with any regulation change. Bridgestone doesn't mind what regulation it is, as long as it is the same for everyone."

The change will not affect the effort Bridgestone plans to put into testing this winter because they had already planned to work harder than ever before in a bid to reclaim their World Championship titles.

Williams, and possibly Toyota, will join Ferrari to boost the amount of testing data Bridgestone can use to develop their tyres and Suganuma believes the new season will dawn with the company displaying increased competitiveness.

"We will do a lot of testing over the winter," he said. "We will have a bigger number of strong teams to work with so we can compare each specification between the teams and that will give us more accurate data. Obviously Ferrari is one of the best teams in Formula One so the feedback from them is always important, but we can now also re-confirm those findings with other strong teams. This year we have worked only with Ferrari and sometimes Jordan Grand Prix and the Minardi Formula One team, but their testing opportunities were very small, so we mainly worked with Ferrari, and the testing changes were quite limited. But this winter we will have more teams, which gives us more of a chance to try a wider variety of tyres at the same time. That wider chance will accelerate our speed of development. Of course, our aim is to come back on top of the table in Formula One, so we hope our Bridgestone teams will compete against each other in the top level, that is our aim for 2006."