For the company's Indy 500 debut in 1995, both Scott Pruett and Scott Goodyear were in position to win the race on
Bridgestone Firestone rubber. But Pruett brushed the wall while leading and Goodyear passed the pace car on the final restart, allowing Jacques Villeneuve to win the race.
"One lesson we learned is that winning is everything," Speyer observed. "When we went to Indy in '95, we had Scott Goodyear on the front row and a lot of our executives just wanted to make sure we qualified for the race. Remember that Honda, another big Japanese company, had gone there the year before and failed to qualify. But, based on our test results, we knew it would be no problem to qualify and we had Scott Goodyear on the front row and eight cars in the field in our first attempt, including a couple that were rookies.
"With twenty laps to go, we had Goodyear and Scott Pruett running out front and they had 223-224mph cars. Nobody else could run over 220 at the end of the run and they were three-quarters of a lap ahead of the field. And then Pruett crashed in turn two and Goodyear made his fateful mistake.
"That was out there in public," Speyer added. "Everybody saw it, but nobody was interested."
But two months later Pruett won the Michigan 500, beating Al Unser Jr's Goodyear-shod Penske after a late-race duel, and Speyer's phone rang off the hook.
"The tyres were as good at Indy as they were at Michigan," Speyer recalled, "But, then, all of a sudden, I'll never forget Larry Curry telling us, 'Al Jr kept pushing Pruett up into the marbles and Pruett just kept his foot in it and drove right around him'. Curry said 'that was all tyres'."
It wasn't long before Goodyear was fighting a rearguard action and, by the end of 1999, the old reliable Indy/Champ Car tyre goliath was no more, waving the white flag and pulling out of CART and IRL.
