Bridgestone’s soft tyre proved to be the fastest rubber on the undulating Spa Francorchamps circuit for the first day of running for the Belgian Grand Prix. In a day of mixed weather conditions, Vodafone McLaren Mercedes driver Lewis Hamilton set the day’s fastest time in the dry afternoon practice session. 

This session illustrated the potential for a close race, with the top 18 cars separated by under a second. Jarno Trulli (Panasonic Toyota Racing) was the fastest driver in the morning practice session, setting a time of 1min 49.675secs on the medium compound tyre. Most of this morning session was run in wet conditions, meaning that Bridgestone’s intermediate and wet tyres were used. This was first time that the latest specification intermediate has seen extensive use. 

Q&A with Hirohide Hamashima - Bridgestone Director of Motorsport Tyre Development 

What was significant about today’s running? 
“Today illustrates what can happen in Spa with the weather. We all expected a dry day, yet this morning we saw a wet circuit. This was good for Bridgestone as we could evaluate the performance of our latest specification intermediate tyre relative to the wet tyre. We are pleased to say our initial performance feedback and data has been as anticipated. In the afternoon we had good running with the dry tyres.” 

How do you expect this allocation to work over the weekend? 
“Spa is an interesting circuit and its characteristics mean that both tyres work well, even though they have different temperature working ranges. Because of this we saw that the medium and soft tyres delivered very close fastest lap times, and most of the field was very close together. We expect to see more tyre evaluation take place tomorrow. We did hear different driver comments relating to the feeling from the tyres, and this is a circuit where driver confidence is very important. We didn’t see graining on either compound so this highlights that both tyres could deliver strong performance if we have a dry race.” 

Image (c) Bridgestone Corporation