Are Bridgestone the Best Option for Formula One?

With F1 returning to slick tyres in 2009 the consideration has to be given to Bridgestone being the best tyre choice for Formula 1. 

Bridgestone has four compounds of tyres that they have available—hard, medium, soft and super soft. Bridgestone selects two tyre compounds for each race and each team has to use both compounds—the softer of the two having a green band on the outside to allow easy identification by fans, media and stewards. All dry tyres are completely slick. 

Bridgestone also have Intermediate and Wet tyres of which they bring one compound of each to every race. If rain occurs and the race is declared officially wet by the race director then teams no longer have to use both compounds of tyres. Intermediate tyres will clear approx 34 litres of water a second when travelling at 300kph and full wet tyres will clear 61 litres per second at the same speed. 

The tyres have been a major point of contention in F1 for the last few years, and 2009 has been no exception. At the majority of races this year there has been one tyre that has been suited to the conditions—these may differ between practice, qualifying and race day. 

Race day is proving though that only one compound works well. There is usually one tyre that is almost completely useless and serves to make strategy more important than actual on track racing. 

It seams that Bridgestone doesn't have the right tyre compounds to allow a complete race to be competitive to all teams. The majority of teams struggle, come race day, to make one of their tyres work for more than a couple of laps.

As we are seeing in the Turkish GP Qualifying, the softer tyre was struggling to complete a single flying lap before it had started to suffer wear and reduced the pace of the cars. Driers were faced with the dilemma of backing off through the long turn eight to preserve the tyres for the last three turns. 

How can that be good for racing?

Fans of motor sports want to see the cars being pushed hard for the entire lap by the drivers, not backing off.   Admittedly, it may make some overtaking possible if a car backs off too much, but in my experience it doesn't work like that. The usual outcome of that scenario is three to five laps behind the safety car, which the marshals remove at least two cars from the circuit, and we have a reduced field for the remainder of the race. 

The solution—there are several possibilities. Bridgestone needs to change their tyre compound to allow all cars to be consistent for the full lap, even if one compound is consistently slower; the rule forcing teams to use both compounds needs to be abolished; or a new tyre company needs to take over. 

Whatever happens no one wants to see a situation where a certain tyre is unsuitable for the race as we saw in the USA GP in 2005, but the current situation is no better.

Surely, a tyre that allows the possibility of racing wheel to wheel all weekend is far better than the system we currently have in place.