why does everyone say michelin is at fault here?

oh well maybe we'll end up with Durex or something making rubber for F1 now.

i can see the new ad campaigns... "At least our rubbers can go round corners"

 

Let me get this straight - you're asking that a racetrack be modified willy nilly and at the last minute just to accomodate an ill-prepared tire manufacturer ?

Where does it end ? I didn't hear Bridgestone b!tch this much when things were going rotten for them the whole of the season. Turnabout is fair play !

 

if the other teams(bridgestone teams) were in favor of a chicane, then it should of went through. But if just one team protested(imo they have every right to do so), then the chicane idea should of been tossed out, which it was! truly sucky race for the fans though.

LONG LIVE CART! lol

 

A no points race? What's the point of that?

Bridgestone look to have managed to produce a tyre that works, and have access to the same resources as Michelin.

Michelin have screwed up.

Did we hear requests for circuit changes because the Minardi's aero package was rubbish at the start of the year? Or for shorter straights because Jordan's car wasn't getting the most out of its engine?

The rules were well set out and it was an even playing field for both tyre makers (arguably stacked well in Michelin's advantage with more than twice the number of development teams!).

Once you set a precedent for changing the rules because a manufacturer (tyre, engine, chassis, fuel - where does it end) can't make a product that will see the end of the GP, you lose all prospect of competition.

 

I would have imagined that had this been Bridgestone last year, NOBODY would have thought of bending the rules this significantly to accomodate Ferrari's championship chase. That the Michelin teams would forfeit valuable championship points just to prove their power over the FIA is ridiculous. The judgement that Michelin is at fault for not having an alternate tire available is completely correct.

I could not see any way they could justify the generous allowance to Michelin teams you're suggesting when the other manufacturer got it right. This was as stupid a decision as I've seen. Take the stop/go penalty, change your tires and compete! There was no guarantee Ferrari would finish the race, and they still could have been competing for first.

 

I understand the Speedvision announcer said Michelin has been racing for 50+ years at Indy. They really can't blame inexperience or unique circumstances. Simple scewup and they will pay the price.

 

Wouldn't they have to do 4 pit stops though(1 for each tire)?

 

How typically French.

We screwed up (after having 5 years at Indy to get it right), so the rest of the world must change; build a chicane, or just go stick it.

Disgusting.

 

Michelin sucks, I am French, but they are the ones to blame, bunch of idiots for not providing the right tire, end of story, no-one else to blame.

Stephane
Scaledetails

 

I was waiting for the typically bigot..

 

Anybody wants to buy my Michelin shares??
Want to get rit of it before mondaymorning before stockexchanges open again!!

 

Nice that the track had these to help take the Michelin teams home. Maybe Bridgestone could race on snow tires??
Go big, or go back to the kiddy pool.
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Why ? Because they screwed they tyres . And the whole race week end.

 

Michelin and the teams are at fault. I agree with the FIA's ruling.

Go Ferrari this should help get things back on track. =)

 

If today, instead of the Michelins having this problem it was Bridgestone...what would have happend? Racing would go on as normal and poor Ferrari, Minardi and Jordan..they just can't get it together. Well, guess what? Ferrari, Bridgestone etc. had it together and deserved to race. Race sucked, but why penalize a team with no problems...just because 14 other cars chose to have Michelins is not Ferraris fault. Adding a chicane to even the field is not fair to the Bridgestone teams. In an interview with David Coulthard (who has been aroung a while) he suggested running all teams and penalizing Michelin teams so as to be fair to Bridgestone teams.

FIA ruined the sport when they tried changing the rules to stop Ferraris dominence. Instead of forcing other teams to compete with the best (although very $$$$), they chose to make the field mediocre and stifle Ferrari. Well, Ferrari shot back...they sucked all year and the tires were bad. Now that they have it together, oh poor Michelin,let's put in a chicane 'cause we F-ed up. Get over it.

Ferrari is powerful because they are good..they weren't so powerful when they were losing, were they? So, Ferrari is stifled and they continue to fight. THey don't ask for more chicanes. And too bad Michelin finds it IMPOSSIBLE to test on a banked curve and prepare tires...Bridgestone did it. And if it was so hard, how did Michelin come up with replacement tires to ship to Indy. They realized they screwed up, corrected the problem, but it was too late. Oh well.

 

IRL cars were having a lot of problems with their tires for the practice before the Indy 500. The sole tire provider (Firestone, which is Firestone-Bridgestone) worked out a lot of problems with their tires then and there. Michelin didn't have the same resources as Bridgestone. All previous data is null for this year since tires needed to be redesigned for 200+ miles, not 50 miles. Bridgestone was lucky to find mistakes by testing earlier at Indy than Michelin. Michelin will learn for next year.

I'm glad the Michelin drivers did what they did (I'm a fan of Williams BMW if you couldn't tell), the FIA obviously doesn't have safety as their number one priority, but the teams were smart enough to know that human life is more precious than points. The FIA suggested teams slow down at turn 13, which would've been 150 kmph slower than the Bridgestone teams (according to the team managers). That's incredibly dangerous especially at that corner. I hope the breakaway series continues because these rules are putting the lives of drivers at risk.

 

Any photochoppers want to run off Bibendum curled up sucking his thumb?

(If we can't win, we won't race. Waah!)

Bridgestone has had to live with their less-than-stellar performance, but Michelin flatly refused to build a tire that had poorer performance, just to be safe.

Pity that burning Michelins in protest would cause such air pollution. (Although there's a pretty bad stink coming from Michelin already.)

The Indy officials wimping out of the podium ceremony was lame. Montero didn't have anything to be sorry about. The fans tossing junk on the track was even more lame -- tossing things at the Michelin trucks maybe, but not at the cars that actually ran.

This is the second year in a row that Minardi got on the scoreboard at Indy.

 

Well said.

 

It's not that they didn't build a poorer performance tire, it's that the FIA only allows you to have 2 sets of tires. Teams would rather have 2 high performance sets than 1 good and 1 bad.

 

Michelin are a massive multinational firm with huge resources. They are in F1 to win (one would hope). They could, and evidently should, have spent more money on testing. Instead of resting on their laurels.

I've said this in other threads, but you cannot eliminate risk in any motorsport. And the further you push the envelope, the more risky it gets. It's the nature of the compromise.

It's interesting to note the attitudes of the people actually putting their lives at "risk" here. They want to race.

The break away series will do nothing but fragment the whole sport even further than it already is, and will end up diluting what little excitement there is left.

The big manufacturers are into this because they think there's a buck to be made. Should they break away, and the fans end up wandering off and the marketing people in their Gucci loafers move onto the next flavour of the day, they'll bugger off and F1 will die.

The big car guys may not like the control that Bernie and his chums have, but they must remember that the team principals allowed him to control it thus. And also that F1 was about to go down the toilet at the time.

Change is required, but we have to be very careful not to knee jerk and throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Michelin have been Manchester United all season, and suddenly fielded a Charlton Athletic. When they realised they screwed up, they wanted the goals made bigger. No dice.

 

I wish people would get off this trip as the cause for all hassles.

I'm a tyre maker.

I'm toold that I have to build a tyre with 4 grooves, certain size requirements AND it must last for a race weekend.

Now, because I'm not skilled at tyres, I'd build that tyre with about 2ft depth of rubber on it and the hardest tyre wall I could possibly engineer. It'd weigh an absolute ton and I'd give it to the chassis boys and tell them to sort the handling out accordingly.

Problems is, one of two things would happen:

1) They would laugh at me and go and sign up with another maker (Bridgestone for example).

2) The car would be so baldy performing that they would come last.

The rules are the same for everyone. Michelin should have made atyre that can stand up to the pace. They chose to push the envelope too far (it's paid massive dividends until today as they've won every race thus far. But the road just ran out).

There are hundreds of rules that should be changed and this wouldn't necessarily be top of my list.

 

But there was the room for compromise. Michelin could have brought in a hardened (but slower) tire, and FIA could have let that go as the "second" tire type (hard compound) -- starting from pit lane if they changed after qualifying.

Instead, Michelin demanded that the track be changed to suit the tires they had.

The FIA tire rules are stupid and unsafe -- but they're the same for everyone.

Michelin asking for special dispensation was just infantile.

It was unfair to the fans, unfair to the drivers, ...

... and unfair to the workers at Michelin tire shops, who may come up short on work for a while.

 

agreed.
now what happens next year for the indy grand prix? if they dont do something dramatic, the stands will b empty again....
my guess is that there is an american in a decent seat for '06, if only to get butts in seats in indiana....my vote is for scott speed, and in something in the top 5.....

 

What happened today was exactly the same as what has been happening to Bridgestone this year--tire testing. All along Michelin has been getting a lot more testing done and have created a tire that has done very well on flat tracks. Now the tables have turned for this banked corner. Bridgestone had testing (Indy 500) and Michelin did not, so of course Bridgestone designed a tire that would work, frankly I'm not surprised. I won't be surprised if Michelin dominates Bridgestone for the rest of this season, but what the two cases I've shown above, the rules are dumb.

For those who say you won't buy Michelin tires anymore, I laugh. I have Bridgestone tires on my car (OEM for 350Z) and they're the RE040 ("high performance" says their website). High performance? BS, I know many owners of different cars who hate their Bridgestone tires, especially in the rain. Michelin PS2 are preferred on a lot of high performance cars and I will switch to those. I could not care anymore less how a tire on a race car performs and try to correlate it with my road tire.