Sidepodcast

Sometimes I feel sorry for the Bridgestone Corporation. Ever since the FIA opened the tender process to be Formula 1’s single tyre supplier, their marketing department have been struggling to keep the black and round things at the forefront of our minds, and in most cases they’ve failed.

The manufacturer did manage to convince the powers that be to mandate two types of rubber be used per race. However that’s served only to confuse race fans and quash any action during the final third of a GP. They only get press coverage when something goes wrong and teams are constantly referring to one their products as the “less favourable” or “inferior” compound.

Keeping all this in mind, my charitable side could almost forgive them for coming up with this loony marketing pitch:

Bridgestone may have created the ugliest Formula 1 tyre of all time.

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• Length: 3:29 
• Size: 3.3 MB 
• File: ancillary1.mp3 
• Transcript: ancillary1.pdf 
• Torrent: ancillary1.torrent 

Welcome to the first episode of the Sidepodcast mini-series: Ancillary F1. This series aims to look a little bit closer at the companies involved in Formula 1, the names you might hear around the paddock, but that aren’t directly competing. Today we’re looking at Bridgestone.

Bridgestone’s origins began, believe it or not, as a footwear company. Shojiro and Tokujiro Ishibashi started putting rubber soles on shoes back in the 1920s and they soon worked their way up to rubber tyres. The name comes from the English translation of Ishibashi – which means stone bridge. They reversed it, and the company flourished.

Despite the war, Bridgestone survived, and in 1950 they made a deal with Goodyear to once more enter the tyre industry. In the 70s, the automotive industry went through a massive boom, and by the 80s, Bridgestone was becoming a worldwide brand. Towards the end of the 80s, they bought out Firestone, who were already running tyres in Formula 1.

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Of all the elements that go into a successful race campaign – driver, pit crew, engineers, aerodynamics, engines – the tyres are way up there with the most important. If your tyres aren’t working, you’re not going to get anywhere. We’ve seen drivers struggle because they stayed out too long, or because they’re suffering some serious graining, or even chunking.

However, if the car is hooked up and the tyres are working well, you can speed to an easy victory. As one of the most important components of a race strategy, it therefore follows that they are key to spicing up the action. Or so Bridgestone think.

At the moment, Bridgestone bring two compounds to each race, adjacent selections from the super-soft, soft, medium and hard tyres. This is only true of dry tyres, by the way, and that’s all we’re discussing here. A wet race demands enough strategy issues of it’s own that we won’t get into here.

Selecting two neighbouring compounds means the difference isn’t all that startling, and although we can just about tell the difference between a soft, single lap tyre compared to a hard, go longer tyre, it’s nothing to write home about. It doesn’t make the drivers rethink their strategies too much, in fact we’ve only had one major decision based on tyres this year (Hamilton in Turkey).

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