Unflagging motivation in the Ferrari team

There's only one way to describe the 2002 F1 season - a total victory for Ferrari. Wins in 15 out of 17 races. Michael Schumacher on the podium in every race, with 11 first places, five second places and one third place. He had already locked away the drivers' title by the 11th round in France.

Hamashima sees several factors as responsible for this sweeping victory.

"Of course, Ferrari had superb cars that year. And we had applied the lessons of the previous year in developing our new tyres. But the biggest factor was that McLaren were definitely not up to their usual form. Surely this was the result of their last minute switch to Michelin. The races that they would have won if they'd stayed with Bridgestone, instead went to Ferrari."

"But just as important was the incredible sense of motivation the Ferrari team had developed. Schumacher, Jean Todt, Ross Brawn - 'a win in every race' was the phrase constantly on all their lips."

Ferrari's great strength came from this determination not just to win the season title, but to win each and every race. They never gave up in the pursuit of total victory, and that was what made 2002 above all the year of Ferrari.

The problem with relying on one team

"It's strange but true - if you look at the record, we were consistently weak in odd-numbered years and strong in even-numbered."

Hamashima could see a definite pattern of alternate wins and setbacks, and it was especially obvious after Ferrari became our top team. He eventually deduced the reason.

In a strong year for Ferrari, a year when they had a chance at the title, development work on the car continued right up until the end of the season. But this delayed the start of development of the following year's car, with an inevitable effect on performance next season.

In a year when they weren't doing so well, they abandoned updates on the current car mid season, and development efforts started to focus early on the machine for the next year. This was the cause of the year-on, year-off pattern.

Ideally, we could overcome this effect by working with several strong teams, so that each year there would always be a strong team to offset the weak one, and Bridgestone would always give a good showing. Our problem however was that, in this period, our only partner with a real chance was Ferrari.

"When Ferrari's development was delayed, that caused delays for all their partners too. To tell the truth, we couldn't really make better speed in development in the tests for teams other than Ferrari. So delays by Ferrari meant delays in our tyre development. It was a double whammy for us. Of course, the reverse also applied - if Ferrari sped ahead with their development, we moved fast with the tyres too."

28,000 km of tyre tests each year

In practical terms, what did it mean that our tyre development depended on how Ferrari's race car development work was progressing?

"At that time, Ferrari were doing between 27,000 and 28,000 km of tyre tests in a year. They did 90 to 100 days of testing, which was about three times more than any of the other teams. We did get accused of tailoring our specs to Ferrari, but in practical terms they absolutely gave us the best chance to test our tyres."

You can hear the passion of the time in Suganuma's words even today.

So, how did he go about these tyre development tests with Ferrari? After analysing the results of each race or test, he would discuss the specifications he thought we should use with Ferrari and ask them to do tyre tests. Ferrari understood the importance of these tests - the quality of the tyre chosen could mean a difference of one or two seconds.

The next step was for the test data to be sent to our Technical Centre in Tokyo, where they would begin constructing the tyres for the following race.

Friday's specs, shipped by Tuesday

Tyre tests between races are aimed at producing wins in the next race but one. That means we have to produce tyres reflecting the latest test results very quickly. Bridgestone race tyre construction is done at the Technical Centre in Kodaira, Tokyo.

Let's see what happens after a tyre test is conducted aimed at the following week's race. Even if tests can be scheduled until the Friday, when we take the time for construction and transportation into account the tyre specs for the following week's race must be decided by the end of testing on Thursday. However, as Suganuma says, "Sometimes we get data on Friday that completely overturns Thursday's decision." This is a major problem for everyone.

"Once we've told the factory to start construction, if we then reverse ourselves and change the specs it obviously causes a lot of problems for them. But we sometimes get very strong requests from the teams. If Friday's test data shows another tyre gives better results, then they'll push us to switch to that spec. We have no choice though. We just have to tell the factory to abandon the earlier order and start again with the new specs, since the whole point of course is to win races. We try to wait until the very last moment before sending the final spec to Tokyo. In the worst case, we send the final Friday test data to arrive in Japan early on Saturday morning, their time. In Tokyo, they have things set up so they can still make tyres with those specs and get them on the plane to us by Tuesday, Japan time."

When you have people working on the same task in Europe and Japan, you have to take into account time differences as well as the physical distance between locations. Without the truly enormous effort put in by all concerned to overcome these hurdles, Bridgestone would not be able to maintain a competitive edge on the track.