The real contest with Michelin was about to begin - the "ultimate battle" as Hamashima thought of it. It had us very worried, since we knew all too well that this was an opponent who would not be easy to defeat.
Michelin - the strongest rival of all
At last, it was time to face Michelin on the track again. The 2000 tests had shown us how strong Michelin were, but they had succeeded in concealing the important details, and we had no idea what tyres they would actually choose to deploy. So it was with a different kind of apprehension that we approached the start of the 2001 season.
The opening race in Melbourne was a shock. The performance shown by the Michelin tyres was far beyond what we were prepared for.
Hamashima: "Their tyres were very good, with a very high level of performance. We were lucky for the first races - but we were winning because cars broke down, not from anything wrong with their tyres. I knew it couldn't last, and in the fourth round they beat us."
This was the San Marino Grand Prix, and things did not go well for Ferrari on the team's home turf. Michael Schumacher placed fourth in qualifying but had to drop out of a race marred by brake trouble. His team mate Rubens Barrichello never recovered from a bad start, after a planned dash from sixth position on the grid went wrong and left him spinning his wheels.
The two McLarens in the front row also messed up their start from the grid, allowing Ralf Schumacher in his Michelin-shod Williams to shoot past from third to take the lead. And that's basically how it was for the rest of the race. His brother Michael had to retire after an accident on the 25th lap, but Ralf Schumacher kept the lead to take his first ever Formula One race win.
Hamashima watched admiringly as Michelin won first place in just their fourth race after returning to F1: "This is a rival worth the match!"
"Michelin had been our first rival back in the 1980s, and we really wanted to beat these guys. They were the leaders, the ones everyone had to beat. But even from the start of this season it was plain that it would not be easy to outdo Michelin."
Different concepts, different tyre shapes
Even a non-specialist would be able to easily spot the difference between these Michelin and Bridgestone front tyres, simply from their shape. Seen from the front, the Michelins had squared shoulders, while ours were rounded.
Suganuma explains: "When we design a tyre, we decide its shape based on durability and distribution of contact pressure. That led us to choose rounded shoulders, while the Michelin designers took a different approach."
It was a contest between two ways of thinking, with each side desperately trying to figure out where the other was going. For example, when we examined super slow motion video of a Michelin tyre going over a curb we could see that, after the initial jump, there was a period where the tyre continued to vibrate slightly. In contrast, our tyres settled down more quickly. What was causing this movement? What was different about their tyres?
"Sometimes our transporters drew up alongside each other, and I would try to sneak a look at the identifying labels on their tyres. That would tell us what specs they had brought for that race. But actually I could never really get a clear view. Then at the Valencia test session, after we finished our test on Friday I heard that Michelin were going to have a wet tyre test on the Saturday. I really wanted to see this, so I asked one of the teams if I could go in with them. Trouble was, being Japanese I rather stood out. I was quickly spotted as a stranger and chased away, although I don't think anyone imagined I was with Bridgestone. Since I wasn't allowed to be on the pit road, I managed to get permission to watch from the control tower, but that was too far away to make out anything useful."
The contest between Bridgestone and Michelin took place not only on the tracks, but also behind the scenes like this.
A year of re-assessing our rival
In 1999 and 2000, we had been Formula One's sole tyre supplier. One result of having no-one to compete with technically was that our pace of development slowed down. We desperately needed to come up to speed again, but having once lost our edge it was proving difficult to get it back. Suganuma recalls the testing schedule after he was brought back on the F1 project from late 2000.
During the F1 season, there is one race about every two weeks. In these years, testing was allowed in the intervals between races, so the schedule looked like this:
Thursday Pre-race meetings at circuit
Friday Grand Prix Practice
Saturday Grand Prix Qualifying
Sunday Grand Prix Race
Monday Travel
Tuesday Testing
Wednesday Testing
Thursday Testing
Friday Testing
Saturday Testing
Sunday Rest day
Monday Reports and documentation
Tuesday Team meeting
Wednesday Team meeting
Thursday Pre-race meetings at circuit
This cycle was repeated endlessly throughout the season.
"The toughest were the races we had to fly to outside Europe, like America and Australia. This meant, for example, arriving at Heathrow after a long flight and catching the next plane to Barcelona in order to do the tests. All we would have time for was a quick shower in the airport lounge."
But as Hamashima points out, our rival faced the same conditions. They also had to struggle to increase the speed and quality of their tyre development in the very limited time available.
"We were well aware of our own strengths and weaknesses. But what were Michelin doing, and what were they thinking? This was always on my mind as we planned our preparations for the next year's season."
"Sorry" was all they could say
After being sole supplier, we were once again faced with our old competitor. The difference was that this time we had a fighting chance - there were top teams running on our tyres too. Ferrari and McLaren were undeniably among the best the racing world had ever seen.
This year Bridgestone achieved our 50th first place, at the 10th round French Grand Prix. Hamashima's chest swells a little with pride as he looks back on this landmark: "Well, from a technical standpoint, the number of wins is proportional to the number of pole positions. You can see this if you look at the details of those 50 wins. It certainly proved the strength of our technology."
Of course, having Ferrari and McLaren on our side also helped. As Hamashima says: "Those teams just went for it, full on every time." Their lust for wins was a great boost to our score.
However, there was one difficulty with this.
"I tried my best to ensure that everything was fair and both teams got the same number of tyre tests, but I think that sometimes their team management didn't see it in the same light…"
In a race, there can only be one victor. And over the course of this year, the team that produced the results was Ferrari.
"I was completely dumbstruck." Hamashima remembers how he felt at McLaren's sudden announcement that they would switch to Michelin. It happened just before the off-season tests were due to start, from December 1st. On a practical level, this timing meant that we had already decided all the details of our winter test programme.
"It was a huge shock. We had already discussed with them every last detail of our coming test programme, and now they could take this knowledge to our rival. My mind just went blank - I didn't know what to do."
At the start of the off-season tests, Hamashima was approached by the McLaren staff he had been working alongside:
"We're very sorry about this, but the decision was out of our hands."
