Bridgestone ready for Indianapolis

After the tough demands of the high speed Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve in Montreal, where Bridgestone shod Michael Schumacher claimed a second place podium position, Bridgestone Motorsport heads now to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the home of the famous Indy 500.

The Formula One cars will drive over the historic bricks at the IMS but unlike the Indy 500 they will use a unique combination of part banked oval and part in-field track. This places great demands on the teams and tyre manufacturers as they strive to find the best set-ups and tyres for their cars.

Hiroshi Yasukawa, Director of Motorsport “Coming to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is always a special event for Bridgestone. Through our Firestone brand we have a wonderful connection with this circuit and its racing heritage. The fans this year deserve to see a thrilling and highly competitive Grand Prix and I know our technical staff have been working closely with our teams to make sure we give them a great race.”

Hisao Suganuma, Technical Manager “Indianapolis is quite unique with its combination of very fast oval and slow infield sections. From a tyre point of view this means we need a tyre with performance characteristics to make the best of both sections of the track. The slow infield requires tyres with good grip which means we are looking at compounds from the softer end of the scale."

"However, the oval is extremely fast so the tyres also need to have very good stability and braking performance. Turn 13 in particular submits the tyres to very high loads and high lateral forces. The drivers are on full throttle through this section so the tyres must be strong enough to cope with both these directional forces. Normally tyres are loaded more on the inboard side of the car because of the negative camber."

"At Indianapolis however, the banking means the outboard side is also loaded so tyre manufacturers have to be vigilant here. Bridgestone has taken all these factors into consideration when deciding with our teams which tyre specifications to bring. The specs have all been very carefully chosen for this race and we will be looking for a good result this weekend.”