2007 No Easier for Bridgestone Teams – Trulli

Toyota Formula One driver Jarno Trulli believes that Bridgestone’s existing tyre partners will not have an advantage over their competitors in 2007. The sport’s leading teams, including McLaren and Renault, have been compelled to switch to the Japanese supplier following Michelin’s F1 departure at the end of the 2006 season, but 32-year-old Trulli insists that the new 2007 ‘control’ tyre is a vastly different animal to Bridgestone’s 2006 equivalent.

The Italian driver told Spain’s EFE news agency that “The tyres are so much harder and so different that we have all started from zero again.”

For this reason he does not expect the Cologne based Toyota team, which began using Bridgestone tyres at the end of the 2005 season, to have it easy next year.
“With these new tyres we have eliminated the blistering and the graining that we experienced with the very soft compounds this year,” he said during a break from practice at Jerez.

“The new tyres have increased the braking distances and that should favour overtaking, but we still can’t really draw any conclusions about that.”