Bridgestone tyres working well in Friday practice

Bridgestone Motorsport's teams have had a busy day today at the Albert Park circuit in Melbourne, Australia. Despite the looming grey clouds and breezy conditions, the weather stayed dry, allowing the teams a chance to start their dry tyre evaluations. As has been the case at the opening two rounds of the 2006 FIA Formula One World Championship, WilliamsF1's Friday test driver Alex Wurz topped the times of the Bridgestone runners, finishing the faster second practice session in second place with a time of 1m26.832 seconds.

With Wurz completing a total of 46 laps the team's race drivers, Mark Webber and Nico Rosberg, were able to minimise their use of valuable sets of tyres, saving them for later in the weekend. Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro's Michael Schumacher and Felipe Massa were not far off the pace either. The pair was sixth and tenth fastest in the second session. Toyota's Jarno Trulli and Ralf Schumacher were 16th and 18th respectively in the second session. MF1 Racing and Super Aguri also got plenty of running in today with MF1 Racing making the most of having Markus Winkelhock as their Friday test driver.

Hisao Suganuma, Bridgestone Motorsport Technical Manager, said: "The Albert Park circuit is a street track but nevertheless we had expected this morning's conditions to be a bit better than they were. In previous years the support race categories would have cleaned up the track a bit more but we had quite low grip conditions today, due to the wind blowing dirt on track perhaps. However, conditions did start to improve in the afternoon session.

The lap times got quicker and the teams were able to get some meaningful work done. We did see some graining but this is to be expected and we anticipate that the circuit conditions will keep improving as the weekend progresses. Our teams were able to compare both their specifications of tyre. Alex Wurz completed the most number of laps of the Bridgestone runners and has been able to give us some some good feedback on the tyres' characteristics. Our new series of compound is working well and we expect to see it being used by some of our teams in Sunday's race."