"I really believe Goodyear was doing the best job they knew how," Mader commented, "Every year, they said they were going to do better, but they never did do better at all. They had the best teams, but they couldn't win. They had Rahal's team, Newman/Haas and Penske, and they couldn't win."
Bridgestone Firestone beat Goodyear on all points - performance, durability and consistency from tyre set to set.
"We had a little bit different philosophy," Speyer noted, "Goodyear seemed to focus on being fast for a short period of time, even in their testing. I remember Michael Andretti, who was still with Newman/Haas and Goodyear at the time, told us Goodyear had a much better tyre coming along. We asked him if they'd made any long runs and he said, 'oh yeah, we ran five or six laps'. But a long run for us was all the way to the end of a fuel load.
"There were two levels of consistency we worked on," Speyer continued. "One was set-to-set on the tyre production run, but the other was consistency during each run on the track. We always felt that if the tyre could remain consistent as you burned off fuel you should run faster at the end of the run than at the beginning.
"If you looked at a Goodyear tyre which might have run at 102 per cent when it was new, it trailed off to 92 per cent as it wore down. We believed that, if we could maintain a hundred per cent level all the time and be consistent throughout the run, that being faster at the end is so important because the end of the run is always the end of the race. I think that was a really significant part of what we did because we were able to run faster at the end than at the beginning of a run."
Mader said Bridgestone Firestone benefited from taking on new teams at the right time.
"In 1996, we added Ganassi's team and Alex Zanardi and Jimmy Vasser, and Forsythe's team with Greg Moore and [engineer] Steve Challis was working with Moore," Mader said, "We had a lot of good people and we had good products and it showed."
