Not big enough yet to challenge the world

Bridgestone Motorsport and the motorsport tyre development team continued to nurture their dream of taking the company into F1 racing. However, Bridgestone was dwarfed by Goodyear, the F1 tyre supplier at that time. Bridgestone management reluctantly decided that the time was not ripe for us to challenge the world's leading tyre manufacturer, since Goodyear's sheer size gave it such an advantage in F1. Instead, we would hone our race technology through F2 competition, then the most popular motor race category in Japan. This was successful - our tyres soon came to dominate the Japanese F2 scene.

Aerodynamics spur a revolution in tyre design

It was during this period that formula race cars began using aerodynamic designs to utilise downforce.
The shape of these cars created a downwards thrust, pressing the car down so it hugged the track. This put much more load on the tyres, increasing gripping power and making cornering faster. Contemporary bias construction tyres were not strong enough to handle this greatly increased load, and issues with abrasion and heat prevented them from giving the required grip. In addition, this construction could not stop the centrifugal force deforming the tyre at high speeds, which affected the suspension. This meant that the suspension settings could not be optimised for best performance with the new aerodynamic bodies.
The solution was to use radial tyres. This construction, using transverse reinforcing belts, was already well developed in Europe. As soon as the new aerodynamic F1 machines began appearing, fitted with radial racing tyres, Bridgestone quickly began developing our own radial designs.

1980 - Radial racing tyre development and international competition

This was when Hirohide Hamashima, who would become the driving force behind the F1 tyre project, was first assigned to motor sports tyre development. Hamashima was an engineer with absolutely no experience in motor sports, but he threw himself with an extraordinary passion into developing a winning tyre.
He was selected for the motor sports tyre development section by then Executive Vice President, Tadakazu Harada. Harada believed Hamashima had the tenacity of character required to carry the development of the new racing radial tyre through to completion. His underlying goal was of course to ultimately take the company into F1 racing via other formula car activities such as F2 and F3000.
The development of the new racing radial tyre did indeed call for extraordinary persistence and enormous effort. It was first tried out on Satoru Nakajima's machine in the autumn 1980 Japanese Grand Prix, and after feedback from that race the tyre was fitted to all F2 Japanese machines from 1981 onwards. Nakajima took the championship two years running, in 1981 and 1982, but the development of this tyre was anything but smooth. On-track performance was unstable at first, and there were many complaints from drivers who were used to racking up wins on the more familiar bias tyres.
Hamashima recalls that, as a brand new engineer on the team, he had to rush from Fuji Speedway just before a race all the way to Tsukuba Circuit to collect bias tyres for drivers who insisted on using them instead of the new radials. This was quite a distance back in the days before Japan's expressway network was built.
Around this time, Honda was preparing to return to F1 racing, and in preparation for this had begun F2 racing in Europe in 1980. Working with Honda would be a great chance for us to enter the international stage.

1981 - Bridgestone enters European racing with a splash

In 1981, we began supplying tyres for Honda machines competing in the European F2 Series. When the Bridgestone race staff first arrived in Europe, they were completely unprepared, had nowhere to stay and no transportation.
Nobuhiko Kawamoto (future president of Honda) provided an introduction to Honda UK, so when Yasukawa arrived in the UK in advance of the others, he went straight from Heathrow Airport to Honda UK to meet its president, Koichi Amemiya. Amemiya (who would later become President of Honda USA, and then Vice President of Honda Motor Co.), asked what he could do to help, and Yasukawa requested a desk to work at. This was how Bridgestone took its first steps in Europe.
Not wishing to be a burden on Honda, Yasukawa soon arranged to borrow desk space at the London office of Bridgestone Diversified Products - a single desk was enough in this period. Having nowhere else to stay, our people lodged with the Honda Team mechanics, and for transportation, Amemiya kindly lent them one of Honda's vehicles. This warm partnership with Honda made it possible for Bridgestone to take on the challenge of European racing.

With only two men in Europe, who would fit our tyres?

At the start, the Bridgestone staff consisted of just two members from Japan, Yasukawa and Hamashima, and they personally did all the work of fitting our tyres to the Honda team's wheels. Yasukawa then became friendly with Alan Docking, who said to him "If you need a tyre fitter, I have a man you can trust." This was Tom Walkinshaw, the owner of Dunlop Racing Tyre Service (DRT) at Silverstone. Walkinshaw took over the work of fitting our tyres without even asking for payment. Yasukawa and Tom became firm friends, and would later work together on the 1996 F1 tyre tests. As Yasukawa says, you can't really talk about our F1 project without mentioning such personal encounters - we succeeded thanks to friendships between people who shared our passion and love of racing.

First meeting with Peter Grzelinski, our future F1 tyre services man

The next friend Yasukawa made was Ron Tauranac. Originally a partner of Jack Brabham, Tauranac moved to F2 to manage the Ralt Team after Brabham's F1 team was bought by Bernie Ecclestone. Tauranac's mechanics would take over the work of fitting our tyres from DRT.
And then came a most important meeting for Bridgestone. At the time Peter Grzelinski was importing tyres to England for F2 and other racing teams from US tyre maker M&H. When Yasukawa asked if he would handle our tyres, he enthusiastically agreed, and set up a new company in a small rented warehouse near Basingstoke. And that was where Bridgestone's European racing tyre servicing organisation began, in a warehouse with one phone, one fax and a single desk and chair.
When we ended European F2 racing in 1985 and returned to Japan, we asked Peter to continue helping Bridgestone UK. And when we decided to participate in the DTM Championship in 1991, it was again Peter we turned to for tyre servicing. Thanks to this long relationship, when we finally entered F1 racing we had this experienced partner ready to lead our tyre servicing staff.

1982 - We taste defeat in Europe

"Looking back, we were like newly-hatched chicks. I can say it now - at first, we didn't understand what our competitors were doing at all. We just had to wonder how they could make such good racing tyres. Really - we were like little children with regard to race technology. It was the same with radial tyres, and the same with setting up our own organisation. When Michelin arrived in 1982, we were amazed at the sophistication of their team - they brought their own motor home, and had separate teams of rim fitters and engineers. It was a big contrast to us - we were so disorganised, we just stored our tyres under the Ralt Honda motor home."
Hamashima laughs now as he recounts those early days. But it was the bitter disappointment of losing to Michelin that would drive him on to achieve great things.
After our defeat by Michelin in 1982, 1983 was another bad year. We couldn't manage to improve the performance of our tyres, and mid-season Honda decided to switch to Michelin. Michelin quickly seized on this and launched an ad campaign in Japan urging drivers to "Switch to Michelin." It was unbelievably frustrating, and even today Hamashima never sees an advert featuring the blue and yellow Michelin logo without feeling a surge of adrenaline.
Fast in the qualifying rounds, but never winning an actual race - this was the reality of our second year of European F2 racing. Our tyres showed excellent grip in the qualifying rounds, but over the longer distances of the actual races we couldn't compete with the much stronger and more durable grip of Michelin's tyres. We now realised that our first year victory had simply been because we were only facing Pirelli and M&H. Things were different with this much more formidable rival.
Maintaining performance over distance would become our core philosophy both for road and racing tyres, and this was due to our setbacks in the European F2 Series.

Learning a different approach to racing

When tests are held in Japan, our Technical Centre at Kodaira in Tokyo receives immediate feedback, either by fax or direct contact, allowing them to control the specifications of the tyres used in each race.
Europe was a different story. Tokyo simply dispatched the tyres that had been developed in Japan. Feedback was sent from each race, but there was no system in place to immediately respond to this data. It was difficult to keep in contact through international phone calls, and when the technicians in Europe tried to make their case, they were often brushed off with comments like "it's not the tyres' performance that's at fault, it's how you are using them." Our European organisation was certainly still not mature, but the way our tyres dominated in races in Japan perhaps blinded Tokyo to the different problems we were facing overseas.
We would prepare two sets of specifications to be selected at the practice session, but there was no concept of changing the specs to exactly match each circuit. The level of thinking was simply, "this spec did well last time, so let's use it again." Of course, if that tyre didn't match the characteristics of the circuit, the results would be poor. In contrast, Michelin always had three or so specs ready for each circuit, ready to match the conditions of the race and the track.
Another problem was that we focused above all on tyres that would come out in front in the qualifying rounds. We failed to grasp the fact that conditions in the race itself would be different, and that the real races required grip that would last right to the end. Fortunately, Shiro Takahashi, Development Section Manager at the time, was always prepared to listen carefully and respond to facts from Europe, using the data to decide what needed development and rapidly providing solutions to our problems.
In the end, we realised that we had to forget about winning qualifying rounds and instead aim to develop a tyre that would maintain the same performance from the beginning to the end of the race. This new approach finally allowed us to beat Michelin, just before we retired from European F2 racing. Harada, who would become the key man in carrying us into F1 racing, couldn't stop the tears of joy flowing as he watched our final victory in Europe. We had at last managed to beat our greatest rival, Michelin.
It took us a long time to change our approach and focus on eliminating performance variations throughout the race, but it was an extremely valuable learning experience.

1984 - Bridgestone purchases high speed drum test machine

As a result of the European experience, Bridgestone's top engineers and managers made the decision to purchase one of the world's most advanced drum test machines. We needed a high-speed test machine to develop performance road tyres too, especially since our goal was to persuade Porsche to fit the POTENZA as standard.
Misao Kawabata, then a section chief at the Kodaira Technical Centre, was the POTENZA development team leader. Kawabata was an engineer so passionate about his craft that in the middle of a date with his fiancee he would start sketching tread patterns on coffee shop coasters, and just walking on the street he would often suddenly stop and begin obsessively examining the tyres of parked cars.
It was the shape of the horseshoe crab's abdomen that gave him the idea for the unidirectional tread pattern, a symmetrical pattern that would shed water easily, and the seamless rails used for the Bullet Train tracks inspired his jointless cap and layer construction for belts. These two new technologies were used in the POTENZA RE71. After its performance had been honed using the high speed test machine and considerable circuit testing, the RE71 would become the first Japanese-made tyre to be fitted as standard by Porsche. And when Ferrari followed Porsche in adopting the RE71, Bridgestone technology was suddenly a talking point among European motor fans.
Hearing this, we became even more enthusiastic about expanding Bridgestone's international activities.

Aiming for F1, tyre tests begin from 1985

In 1985, the rear tyres used in the top class of Japanese formula racing were very similar to those fitted to F1 machines, the only differences being slightly greater width and diameter. This allowed the motor sports tyre development team to conduct a program of testing with a future F1 tyre in mind.
They never used the name "F1 tyre" - instead it was referred to as "radial racing tyre basic development" and all testing was kept out of sight indoors.
In 1987, when F1 finally returned to Japan, the development team was at Suzuka Circuit, stopwatches at the ready, intently making detailed measurements. They wanted to measure the speeds over different sections of the circuit, to compare them with current F3000 performance.
Their measurements showed that F1 was faster on the straight sections, but F3000 was faster on the East Course all the way until the cars emerged from the "S" Curves and the Dunlop Curve. This race was run on tyres from one manufacturer - Goodyear - so these times allowed us to accurately estimate the tyres' grip level, providing valuable data for our own F1 tyre development.

1988 - Our grand strategy to become world number one

Looking back on our 1982 defeat in the Europe F2 Series, it was clear that the cause was the sizeable gap in corporate capability between Bridgestone and our rival Michelin.
In the years following, Bridgestone management looked seriously at possibilities for expanding internationally, with the ultimate goal of becoming the world's leading tyre company. This thinking was behind our takeover of Firestone in 1988.
Yasukawa was always questioning the direction of Bridgestone's motor sports activities. When Hiroshi Ishibashi, then one of our auditors, told him "Never forget that motor sports must always be a business tool to help us sell tyres," Yasukawa realised that he needed to change his thinking - the goal could not simply be to take part in racing; he must set objectives that would clearly benefit the company.
Yasukawa told Ishibashi that we had retreated, become local in our thinking and limited in outlook - the company needed to take on overseas challenges again. Bridgestone was probably not yet ready for this, but we needed to plan for the long term.

1989 - Technically ready to develop an F1 tyre

In 1989, we were approached by Mugen, who wanted us to supply tyres for secret circuit tests of a car they hoped to enter for F1.
The man who made sure Bridgestone agreed to this proposal was none other than Tadakazu Harada. Harada had never lost hope that someday we would enter F1, despite management's decision to put this off indefinitely, and he had kept his young engineers involved in developing the basic technology for an F1 tyre throughout the second half of the 1980s.
At first, we used a test tyre based on Group C car tyre technology to acquire data. Group C cars were fitted with high-power turbo engines and were very fast. In this first stage of development to ensure that our F1 tyre was robust enough to run safely at the required speeds, the test machine had a Mugen F1 engine in a Reynard F3000 chassis.
That year, Kazuyoshi Hoshino, despite being the driver most able to get maximum performance from our tyres, struggled just to reach third position in the Japanese F3000 Series. This disappointing result forced Bridgestone to completely rethink the basic technology of our F3000 tyres. Using advanced materials research and simulation technology showed that we needed to create a better total balance between construction and compound in order to improve contact and grip.
This new development philosophy naturally also influenced our work on the F1 test tyre as, from 1990, Mugen took another step toward race-readiness by switching to a Tyrrell F1 chassis for their test car. The tests continued until 1994, and at that point the development team reported to Harada that, given two years to prepare, we could be technically ready for F1 participation. However, Bridgestone as a corporation still had no official F1 plan.