From itv-f1.com (yes, I know)
The Mole cannot help but wonder about something that happened at the Japanese Grand Prix which played a vital role in determining which team won the World Championship.
You may recall that throughout the early part of the season McLaren and Ferrari were pretty evenly matched.
On several occasions the McLarens were able to survive longer than the Ferraris on the same sets of tyres. And that meant victory to the silver cars.
On other occasions Michael Schumacher had to pick a slightly harder compound of tyre to those being used by the McLaren drivers because the softer compounds were marginal on the Ferrari. And that meant that Schumacher had much more trouble keeping up with the McLarens.
In Japan Bridgestone did a very strange and unusual thing.
Normally the company takes two different tyre compounds to every race, even if they are fairly close together in terms of performance. This gives teams a choice.
But in Japan there was only one compound.
The Bridgestone people said that a new soft compound that had been developed was not ready and so all the teams would have to make do with the same medium tyres. These were new and rather more durable than earlier medium compounds.
It was strange that the Bridgestone Motorsport department should have such logistical problems after four years in the business.
Mika Hakkinen said it did not make any difference but McLaren technical director Adrian Newey remarked that the tyres "are a little harder than we'd like" and compared them to hard Bridgestone tyres which had been used at Suzuka in 1998. On that occasion, he said, McLaren had chosen to run a softer compound.
In the race Hakkinen could not gradually build up a lead as he had done in previous events and when he stopped for the second time he lost four and a half seconds on his first lap out of the pits because he had no grip. That meant that Michael Schumacher went ahead and so won the race and the World Championship.
It is history now but The Mole cannot help but wonder what might have happened if McLaren had been in a position to use the soft Bridgestone compound which appeared a few days later in Malaysia.
This is obviously an area in which Bridgestone people get very edgy.
Bridgestone does not want to be seen to be anything other than completely fair to all the teams and it would not look good at all if it appeared that one team was being favoured over another.
A cynic would say that it was all about marketing. One way or the other a Bridgestone car was going to win the title this year.
Which was a better bet from a Bridgestone point of view? Neither McLaren nor Ferrari was going to make a fuss because both teams receive $2m a year just to use the Bridgestone tyres. It is easy money and to complain about tyres would simply be seen as sour grapes.
It is really rather embarrassing for Bridgestone that in terms of prestige and coverage Ferrari is obviously the better choice.
If McLaren had won again it would have been the team's third consecutive drivers' title and to most news editors around the world the same old story is not a story at all.
There was more coverage for Ferrari because it has taken the Italian team so long to win the title.
In terms of glamour there is little argument, except perhaps in the Mercedes-Benz canteen, that Ferrari is more glamorous than Mercedes-Benz.
It is also rather embarrassing for Bridgestone that Mercedes-Benz has virtually no business with Bridgestone. The big Mercs roll out of Stuttgart on Continental rubber and the smaller cars go out on Goodyears and Pirellis.
Ferrari on the other hand buys around 15,000 Bridgestone tyres a year.
This is not a huge market but it is a very prestigious one for Bridgestone.
There is almost no money in it because getting tyres homologated for a Ferrari is an expensive business, costing probably $1.5m. This money is what you have to spend to get Ferrari's approval for your tyres.
There is a certain amount of return on the investment because the buyer of a Ferrari is basically a captive to the brand of tyre that he gets with his car.
A lot of the top sporting car companies insist that customers do not change tyre brands because, they say, it will affect handling and so on.
There are also insurance issues that come into it.
The tyres are virtually impossible to repair and so there is a certain amount of business from replacement tyres. And that soon builds up when the tyres cost as much as $300 apiece.
So, whether the Bridgestone people like it or not, from the point of view of prestige and, to a lesser extent, money it was in the company's interest to have a Ferrari victory.
This may be inconvenient but it is hard to argue otherwise.
What does it all mean? Nothing.
The only thing that does not really make sense is that The Mole was told about two months before Suzuka that Bridgestone would be helping Ferrari to win the World Championship.
But you cannot read much into that.
Can you?
What do you all think? I find it unlikely that Bridgestone would do this deliberately, and ultimately Schumacher deserved the title anyway.
