Question:
With the championship decided, how important was it for
Bridgestone to win at Phillip Island?
Hiroshi Yamada:
We always enter each race weekend with same mentality, to challenge for victory with our teams and riders. Australia was still a very important championship race, for Ducati especially, because the manufacturers' title was still open. It was also the home race for three riders on our tyres,
Casey Stoner,
Chris Vermeulen and
Anthony West, so there was a lot of extra motivation for a good result.
Phillip Island is one of the most demanding circuits on the calendar for tyres and we have never seen a rider on Bridgestone tyres win there, so Casey's victory this year was an historic achievement for us. With Loris in second place, it was the first Ducati 1-2 since Valencia 2006, which helped them take a clean sweep of the championships in style, and deservedly so after such a dominant season.
Q:
Moving on to Malaysia, with totally new track surface, what expectations did you have?
HY:
We came to Sepang knowing that it had been resurfaced earlier this year. The basic characteristics of the track remained the same though with two long straights and anticipated high temperatures, which usually require harder
compound tyres to be used. On Friday, we started to get a clearer picture of the track's behaviour, even if the circuits had not fully ‘rubbered in' yet. The new asphalt appeared quite abrasive and a lot of riders found it quite slippery.
Nevertheless, the performance of the harder specification tyres gave very good initial results. We were unable to carry out any really long runs in practice, so the durability did remain a question mark before the race, especially with the very hot temperatures that we had on Sunday afternoon.
Q:
Were you surprised by the competitiveness in the race?
HY:
Based on the Saturday practice times, there were some riders who were setting times in the low-mid 2m02s, including many Bridgestone-shod riders, so we were quite optimistic for the race. There were some very quick lap times in the race itself and the top riders were all lapping within tenths or even hundredths of a second of each other.
