Providing MotoGP’s black gold: Exclusive Interview with Bridgestone’s Tom Tremayne

Bridgestone enters their third year as the single tyre supplier for MotoGP. 2011 is also the last year of their contract as such and at the moment it’s up in the air if 2012 will see the return to tyre competition along with the switch to 1000cc bikes or if another tyre supplier will take over or if everything stays as it is.
In any case, after two years as the sole tyre supplier Bridgestone has accumulated a wealth of experience, countless amounts of data and changed the approach MotoGP teams take to their tyre selection.

We caught up with Bridgestone press officer Tom Tremayne at the final test of 2010 in Valencia and talked with him about slicing up tyres, building rider-technician relationships and masses of data.

Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, Tom. You’re also a racer yourself, is that right?
Yeah, that’s actually how I got started. I used to do a lot of car racing. Not so much now, because I don’t really have so much time to do it. On the weekends when I’m home I still do some racing, but not a huge amount.

Does that racing experience help you to do your job with Bridgestone and in the paddock?
Yeah, massively.

In what way is it useful for you?
Just because, from one side, I’ve done the whole sitting on the grid, waiting for the lights to turn, that side of things. And also it helps to understand the nature of racing, because it’s quite a different profession or sport, whatever you want to call it. It’s got quite a unique nature. So it helps me to understand that.
Plus, you know, the way the riders or drivers work with their teams and crews and mechanics. And a little bit the psyche and mindset of riders. That’s all helpful, especially when you’re dealing with them. To try and present things in a way that works for them, to not rub them up the wrong way.

Talking about the tyres, what exactly happens with the piles of used tyres you have to collect after every race weekend and every test?
They all go from the circuit back to Germany in the first instance. And then some of them go back to Japan for further analysis. There we cut some of them apart and can dissect them. You can gain quite a lot of data from looking into used tyres, namely in the way the compound performs. But after this they all get destroyed.

And how do you go about analyzing the tyres?
We have equipment here [at the circuit], that means we can slice sections out of the tyre and then we put them under microscopes and various equipment like that. We can look at how the inside of the compound is behaving. And obviously there’s a lot more we can do back in Japan ahead of this, but that’s all a bit more technical and also a bit confidential as well.

We had two new tracks in 2010. Can you explain to us again how you prepare for these circuits when you have no previous data?
Well, for Silverstone we’ve got a lot of data from past years from Formula 1, albeit not for the new layout. But we had data for about three quarters of the circuit from F1. So we take a lot of this which is very useful. We also look at, in the case of Aragon, at circuit design drawings. We actually had access to the CAD layout plans of Aragon, so you can really model a precise canvas and predict speeds of corners. So we take that as one element to assess the character of the layout.
And then the other one is to look at the actual nature of the tarmac itself. We get like a latex that we pour onto the surface on various points around the lap, lift that up and it takes an inverse imprint. Then they both go back to Japan and you take another mould from them, so you end up with a section of Silverstone or Aragon or any new circuit back in Japan. And then you can analyze more carefully, more closely, the grain of the tarmac, the properties of it.

And what about tracks like Indianapolis which has several different types of tarmac in the MotoGP layout. Does that change your approach of working?
No, because what we do is to pick points around the lap. So you take several samples from a lap to try and get a good idea of what the layout, what the grain of the tarmac is like around the lap and then take an average of that.

Building up so much data during the two years, does it change your development work now, does it get easier?
This year we made a few tyre changes from 2009. We made a few improvements, different compounds and things like that. For 2011 we will actually make very few changes. We’ve got to a point now where we’ve been developing all through this year [2010]. The latest is the extra soft compound we started using for Australia, Estoril and here [Valencia]. So we’ll carry that into next year. It’s always the more we do it, the more data we build up.
But actually one of the big challenges going into next year is establishing new relationships between our engineers and Valentino at Ducati and Casey at Honda, with all the rider moves.

What’s the most difficult thing for you with many rider changes at once?
For the tyre engineers it’s a big change. Some of the riders still work with the same people as last year, we try to keep as much consistency as we can, but inevitably there are some rider changes which mean new relationships. And these are as you can imagine really crucial, to get the relationship between rider and engineer. Because they give us a huge amount of feedback and data.

Is it a bonus for you when you have so many riders to support?
We get a huge amount of data now, because we collect very detailed tyre data from every rider from every session. And because we now support all the riders on the grid, naturally we get more feedback. For sure it’s a bonus for us. It’s a huge asset, because all the feedback we get here doesn’t just help what we do in the MotoGP paddock, but it also filters down via our head office in Japan to all the Battleax road tyres.

What happens when you get diametrical rider feedback, when one complains about lack of grip while another thinks it’s perfect?
One of the big changes of the single tyre supplier era is that it is now no longer about making a custom tyre to fit a circuit, a bike and a rider. It’s about giving the teams and riders a known quantity, a constant, and them having to work more on the bike to get it to work with the tyres. So actually some of our role spills over into trying to advice based on the data of previous experience of all the different manufacturers, how best to get the bike and rider package to work with the tyres. So it flips the focus a little bit.

In terms of work during the weekends, what has been the biggest change over these two years?
Nowadays there are obviously far fewer tyre choices available. Back in the years of tyre competition we had many, many more compounds. So, discussions with the riders were not more technical, no more precise, but they were perhaps more involved in tyre selection. Now the tyre selection is a simpler process, but then our role spills out into helping them get the bike working best with the tyres. So this is arguably the biggest change.

What does the usual preparation for a race weekend look like, how far ahead do you plan?
Nowadays we work far more in advance. Again, back in the times of tyre competition, when competitors were making tyres in overnight specials, the lead times were much, much shorter. That was one of our disadvantages, that our tyres were coming from Japan. We still had to allow a week to get them over here [to Europe]. Whereas now we know exactly which compound we’ll bring to each race throughout the season, which allows us to do all travel by sea freight now instead of air. So we can plan lot in advance.
All the tyres are made in Japan, travel from there to the base in Speyer, Germany and to the European races they’re then driven out in the trucks from Speyer to the various paddocks where they arrive on Tuesday normally. To the flyaway races some of the tyres are shipped back from Germany, some are shipped directly from Japan, just depends on the logistics.

So in the end your basic work has already been done before the race weekend even starts?
Yes, many, many months before the GP starts.

Talking about testing, do you have to work differently with new compounds to test?
The process of work doesn’t really change at all, we’re still here to provide tyres and to supply technical support. But during a race weekend we’re trying to supply the teams with something that’s consistent. If we’re changing the tyre specs all the time from session to session, it would completely throw their setups out of the window and nobody would get anywhere. So during the race weekends we try to supply a constant and then we try to make absolutely the most of testing, because it’s so limited this year.
For this test here [Valencia], we have the standard allocation that each rider gets, which are the same specs as they used here for the race and we also have four test specs available to each rider, one front tyre and three rear tyres, so we increase the number of tyres for each rider.
So, a lot of our work this weekend is still providing the tyre support, building the relationships with the new riders, starting the new lineups and changes and building those stronger for next year.
But when we get the opportunity to test – because the riders are not obliged to test our tyres, although generally they are very supportive in helping us with things like that –we then get a lot of data and a lot of feedback from them about specific points that we can pinpoint on each test item.

How much of that feedback can you actually use for development right now? Many riders changed bikes and teams and probably would have to get used to that first.
Yeah, that’s true. But having said that, MotoGP riders are incredibly sensitive to tyres in the sense that they can give fantastically accurate feedback. Yes, there is another variable in play when you get riders who are moving teams and jumping on a new bike, but we can still get data with a lot of value. And also, having said that, there are also riders like Lorenzo who are staying with the same equipment or at least the same manufacturer, so the data is still valid for sure.

With so few days of testing but supplying all 17 MotoGP riders, is that generally enough data for you to work with or would you possibly want more test time as well to collect even more feedback?
Well, with a single tyre supplier the development slowed down a bit. You know, the laptimes, the performance is still there – we had eight new lap records this year. But the pace of the development has slowed down. So with the test days we’ve got it’s deemed by our technical center enough to continue tyre development to a suitable level. But it really does mean that we need to make the most of every test opportunity.

We thank you for the interview, Tom.

The final test of the 2011 preseason takes place at Qatar on March 13th and 14th.

Interview and photos by Vroom Media.
Feature photo by Bridgestone Motorsport.