Over the past dozen years, Bridgestone Firestone - the world's largest tyre and rubber manufacturer - has also established itself as the globe's best race car tyre builder.
Bridgestone Firestone first defeated Goodyear in CART and IRL racing at the end of the twentieth century, then beat Michelin in
Formula One. Today, the company is the spec tyre supplier to the world's top three forms of open-wheel racing -
F1, Champ Car and IRL.
Bridgestone earned its place at the top of the heap in CART when the Indy Car World Series was at its height, thrashing Goodyear with faster, more consistent tyres that were better engineered and better built. The company entered CART in 1995 with three teams - Patrick Racing, Steve Horne's Tasman team and Dale Coyne - and five cars. Four years later, Bridgestone had beaten Goodyear so completely that the long-time CART/USAC tyre king pulled out of CART and IRL, leaving Bridgestone Firestone as the
de facto spec tyre supplier for both series.
"We had five cars in '95, ten in '96, fifteen in '97, twenty in '98 - and then it was over," remarked Al Speyer, Bridgestone Firestone's executive director of motorsport.
Bridgestone Firestone has continued to produce a superb product for Champ Car and IRL, and the company has also been extremely successful in Formula One, winning seven world championships since entering F1 eleven years ago. Michelin proved a tougher challenger in F1 than Goodyear in CART, but Bridgestone was beaten to the F1 title only once by Michelin in recent years and takes over this year as F1's spec tyre suppler.
"Our two racing programmes are pretty independently run," Speyer commented, "We are tied together technologically, but our Formula One programme is run by an entirely separate unit than our unit for both Champ Car and Indycar here in the United States."
Bridgestone's world headquarters are located in Japan, of course. The company bought Firestone in 1988, creating Bridgestone Americas, the largest subsidiary of the parent company.
