With the retirement of Goodyear, we now found ourselves in a new position as sole Formula One supplier. The first thing that happened was that the FIA suggested an increase in the number of front tyre grooves from three to four. Hamashima recollects them saying that this was because the large inside block on the front tyres with three grooves gave a speed advantage. "In other words, they were telling us to make slower tyres." This was a fresh challenge to our tyre designers, who until then had focused on increasing speed. And, even though Bridgestone was now sole supplier, we negotiated with the FIA to use two dry-weather and three wet-weather specifications for each race. We had four compounds for the dry-weather tyres: extra-soft, soft, medium and hard. Two of these were to be used in the race. But what happened was that the teams only selected the soft types. Using only soft tyres in the race, where lap times are slower than in the qualifying session, affected the way the teams used the tyres. This was completely unexpected for us, and caused us to reconsider our approach for the following year.