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Bridgestone's soft tyre carried Sebastian Vettel (Red Bull Racing) to his
fourth pole position of the season for tomorrow's Japanese Grand Prix at
Suzuka.
Vettel
set a time of 1min 32.160secs in a qualifying session which was red flagged
three times. Panasonic Toyota Racing Driver Jarno Trulli set the fastest
time in the morning practice session, also using the soft Bridgestone
Potenza.
 Q&A with Hirohide Hamashima - Bridgestone Director of Motorsport Tyre
Development
What was significant about today's running?
"Today was a big challenge for all drivers. The weather was dry, meaning
that yesterday's information from a wet track was not much use. This meant
that teams only had the one hour of FP3 to accumulate the same data they
would usually gain over four hours of practice. The track improved, as we
would expect with the first dry running of the weekend, but this made set-up
a challenge and we saw an interesting order at the end of FP3. The
difficulty continued in qualifying, with two red flag periods in Q2 and one
in Q3. It seemed that the older surface of the west track gave less grip for
braking which may have caught out some drivers. Sebastian Vettel did well to
get pole today and we hope that Timo Glock was not badly hurt in his
accident."
What are the tyre strategy considerations for tomorrow's race?
"Obviously we do not have as much data as we would have if Friday had been
dry, but this is one of the challenges of motor racing. The soft tyre is
definitely the quicker tyre, and it does not appear to have too bad
degradation levels, meaning that it could be the preferred race tyre. The
hard tyre takes longer to warm up than the soft, but we do not have
sufficient data to know exactly the lap time difference between the two
tyres. That said, I'm sure we will see an exciting race here at Suzuka." |
