San Marino GP debrief with Hirohide Hamashima

The San Marino Grand Prix was gained by Yamaha’s Jorge Lorenzo who certain his 3rd victory of the season, closing Casey Stoner’s lead in the Championship standings to 35 points with 125 points still available from the remaining 5 GP

The hot and humid weekend encountered a few falling rain drops on Friday and again on Sunday at the start of the race, though the conditions continued dry. The weekend was the 1st time that Bridgestone chose asymmetric rear slicks for Misano in the single tyre era, and the lap times were fast. As early as Friday morning, the leaders were under the lap record, with Stoner setting a new pole position record, and Lorenzo set a new lap record.

Hirohide Hamashima – Assistant to Director, Motorsport Tyre Development Division

This year asymmetric rear slicks were took for Misano – what result did they've?
“I believe that we can see clearly from the lap times that the pace was much quicker this year, and thoough we can't attribute it all to our tyres, we can at least say that the asymmetric rears offered a distinct performance advantage. To be under the lap record from the very first session of the weekend on a Friday morning is very strange and impressive, and that pace remained all weekend. In qualifying, Stoner set a new pole position record, and in the race Lorenzo set a new lap record and new total quickest race time. This appearances us that outright grip was high and durability and consistency over race-distance were also well.”

“The target of selecting asymmetric slicks for Misano this year was to increase rider feeling and thus safety on the lesser-used left side of the rear tyres and to offer a performance advantage, and I can jubilantly say that I consider we achieved both of these.”

Many lap records have been beaten since 2009, so why is it so important to set a new pole record?
“Simply because most of the current pole position records were set before the single tyre situation started in 2009, so in the era of tyre competition. This was when qualifying tyres were used – configured to provide maximum grip at the expense of durability, lasting only a handful of laps. From our experience, qualifying tyres are in the region of one second a lap faster than race tyres. Now, since 2009, we no longer use qualifying tyres so Casey’s pole position record was set on race tyres. This is only the 8th pole record that has been set since 2009 and of those, 2 were at Silverstone and Aragon which were new circuits last year, one was at Assen which was shortened by 13m in 2010, and 2 more were at Mugello and Indianapolis which had new and bettered surfaces. Of course, this can't be credited just to tyres and this betterment in laptime also shows the hard work of the producers in improving machine performance year-on-year.”

“This gives an idea of the level of performance during the San Marino GP over the weekend, and I'm very delighted indeed with this, especially as we saw that exactly the same tyre compounds as used by Casey on his pole record lap were used in the race to set a new best total race time, so clearly the additional performance of our asymmetric rear slicks wasn't at the expense of durability. I consider this shows the level of development we're still doing with our MotoGP tyres, and that we're not simply standing still now there's no tyre contest.”

San Marino GP debrief with Hirohide Hamashima 2011-09-07T19:02:00+07:00 Rating: 4.5 Diposkan Oleh: Admin