In Shanghai, Bridgestone’s super soft tyre was used by Jenson Button’s Brawn as he set Friday’s fastest lap time in the afternoon practice session held in sunny weather conditions. Lewis Hamilton had set the fastest time on the harder compound in the morning session. The practice session is the first time that Bridgestone’s super soft compound tyre has been used at Shanghai. Hirohide Hamashima, Bridgestone director of motorsport tyre development noted that the early Championship leaders Brawn and Toyota “appear to be using their tyres well, but some other teams are still finding the best set-ups. In the second session we saw both tyres used and the performance of the super soft in terms of degradation was not as bad as in Australia.”

He was also keen to stress the challenge posed by Bridgestone’s employment of the super soft tyre, in line with the supplier’s promise to make tyre usage an important tactical aspect of the season: “For 2009 we are making a bigger difference between the two compounds and this is in response to requests for this from the FIA and the teams… Here we have the medium tyre, which should be a strong race tyre, and the super soft, which will require good tyre management in terms of car set-up and driving style. Of course, we saw different approaches to using the super soft tyre in Australia, with some approaches working much better than others, so it will be interesting to see competitors rise to the challenge here in Shanghai.”