The two big changes in 1998 were Goodyear announcing that this would be their last year in Formula One, and the introduction of grooved tyres. Adding grooves reduced the size of the contact patch by about 20% and caused extra wear from the edges of the grooves. To combat this we needed to use a harder compound, but this degraded cornering performance. What could be done? We came up with an idea that turned conventional wisdom on its head: make the front tyres wider. We increased the width by 20 mm and the diameter by 10 mm. The team engineers objected strongly to this proposal: "Increasing the frontal projected area will degrade the aerodynamics." But Hamashima won them over by demonstrating that the gains from the wider tyres would be greater than the aerodynamic losses. And he was conclusively proven right by the stunning speed shown by the McLaren team in the opening series. Although even our rival tyre supplier was opposed to the wide tyre idea, we ignored all objections and pressed on to win the title in this, our second year of F1 racing. We had succeeded in our greatest wish - to defeat Goodyear before they retired from Formula One.