Spec Tire Racing 3 Ways

As soon as the control tire details were revealed, the riders voiced their dissent. The original proposal was for each rider to have 20 dry tires and four rains for the weekend. Bridgestone would choose two from among seven different tires, whether in compound or construction. Each rider would get five each of the two fronts and five each of two rears. Said Ducati Marlboro's Casey Stoner, who won the '07 title on Bridgestones, "The amount they have given us at the moment is stupidity. There needs to be a minimum of three compounds, A, B and C, soft, medium and hard. You can't just have medium hard and hard or whatever they're choosing." Six months later, at the '09 Japanese GP, Fiat Yamaha's Rossi kept up the thread. "For me two tires are not enough," he said. "For me 20 tires in total is okay, but we don't have enough choice with one hard and one soft. We will see in the future what happens in the next races, but it is possible to have this problem for everybody just with two choices." Rossi was hoping for relief two races on in Le Mans

But that was never going to happen. All of the tires are shipped from Japan to Europe by sea, and Bridgestone's Hiroshi Yamada said that all of the tires through the June British GP were en route. There would be no third option.

By sending the tires by sea instead of air, Bridgestone saves around 30 percent on shipping, maybe more. These are considerable savings, especially considering that Bridgestone is the only company in a spec tire series that provides tires free of charge. "This is one of the biggest advantages from the one make tire rule from the tire company's side," related Yamada.

To service all five factories last year, Bridgestone made more than 30 variations of rear tire, with different compounds, constructions, and profiles. Bridgestone not only supplied tires to every manufacturer, but they built tires for individual riders. This year they'll make just four different front compounds and six rear compounds, choosing two fronts and two rears per race. Everyone gets four sets of rain tires, and an extra set if it's wet for all sessions; there are no intermediates. Every tire will have two barcode stickers, one for the FIM and one for Bridgestone; tires will be randomly allocated by the FIM on Thursday before each race.

"Last year, on average we brought around 1100 tires for 12 riders," Yamada said. "So this year (for 18 riders) for slick tires we bring only 360 tires and including wet tire we bring [to Motegi] 540, plus we have some spare tires in case of damage from the mounting process or something like that. Let's say we bring each race maximum 700. This means if we compare the 1100 to 700, 400 reduced."

"It's very difficult to make them happy," Yamada said of the 18 MotoGP riders. "This is racing. Only one rider can win. Fortunately we already had experience with the five different manufacturers of the bikes last year, so we have so much data, then we could create the standard base tire for this year. And we were already a bit, of course, concerned about the performance for each manufacturer and each rider. But after the first test at Valencia, and also we had one more test in November of last year, these two tests almost every rider said, 'oh, performance is OK.' And we were a little bit surprised, but we were very happy."

Repsol Honda's Andrea Dovizioso isn't happy. The Italian's complaint is that he can't get heat in the tires. Yamada acknowledges that Honda is struggling and has heard the rumors Honda used a different construction, "which is not true. Then, of course, everybody understands the situation of the one make tire. They need to adapt for the tire or their machine. But...the Repsol team, they couldn't make the right adjustment for the tire with the chassis or suspension." Spaniard Toni Elias in his return to the San Carlo Honda Gresini team has to add eight kilograms (17.6 pounds) of ballast to his factory RC212V to get heat in the rear.

"Our 2009 construction and shape includes a compound that nobody used last year. This is new," Yamada said. The tire was slightly modified, but based on a construction that many riders used, especially at the end of the season, "then that's why many riders were happy about the performance of the tire. Just, I don't know what happened with the Repsol team."