"The USA and Canada is over forty percent of the world's tyre market," Speyer remarked, "so our operations are quite important to the company worldwide. No other single geographic area has as much impact on the success or failure of
Bridgestone Japan as our North American operation."
Bridgestone Firestone North America is part of Bridgestone America, which is headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, but most of its Champ Car and IRL tyres are built in Akron, Ohio, at a former Firestone factory. Its
F1 tyres are built in Japan.
"We're to the point now where virtually all the Champ Car and Indycar tyres next year will be made in Akron," Speyer reported, "All the
Formula One tyres are produced at our tech centre in Tokyo and the Formula One service group based out of the UK."
Speyer and his top men in the racing division are very secretive about the keys to Bridgestone Firestone's success.
"There are a lot of little things we've done that are our own trade secrets that even to this day we protect pretty highly," Speyer remarked, "A lot of the stuff we do, we can't talk about. We don't want to because it might help our competition, even now that we're a spec tyre supplier.
"There are processes we go through at the factory and in the field within our service organisation and in the way we store and ship our tyres. There are a lot of details. An important part, I think, is the way we interact with the teams on an engineering basis and on a testing basis."
Speyer says Bridgestone Firestone structured its testing very differently than Goodyear's testing method. An important difference was keeping control of the tyres by leasing rather than selling them.
"From the beginning, we leased our tyres," Speyer said, "We don't sell them. They're bar-coded and we take them all back. Some of them are analysed in detail back in Akron. But whether they get analysed, or not, they all get burned in a cement kiln because it is the environmentally best way to get rid of them."
