Spanish GP Bridgestone race notes

Barcelona May/ 30/ 1999 1999 SPANISH GRAND PRIX - RACE

Hakkinen and Coulthard restore McLaren morale.

Scoring the first 1-2 result of the season for West-McLaren-Mercedes, Mika Hakkinen and David Coulthard lead from start to finish in the Spanish GP, round 5 of the 1999 world championship. In the battle for the drivers' title, reigning world champion Hakkinen, with a total of 24 points, has closed the gap on Michael Schumacher (30 points) to six. The hopes of Schumacher and his Ferrari team mate Eddie Irvine faded at the start when they were separated from the McLarens by the fast-starting BAR of 1997 world champion Jacques Villeneuve. By the time Villeneuve was ready to make his first pit stop on lap 25, Coulthard in 2nd place was more than 20 seconds in front of him, and not even a mistake by Coulthard in overshooting his pit allowed Schumacher to get close enough to attack.

Yoshihiko Ichikawa, Bridgestone Motorsport Technical Manager: "With the weather staying quite hot today, the Soft spec tyre had slightly more degradation than the Medium spec, which was what we predicted. Drivers using the Soft specification did not have the same consistency of wear as the ones who chose the Medium compound. It should be mentioned that Michael Schumacher's first two sets of tyres, unlike the third, were new and unscrubbed.

"We now move on to help with testing at three different circuits: Fiorano, Monza and Silverstone. All the teams testing this week will have the opportunity to evaluate the Soft compound which will be taken to Canada as an alternative to the Medium specification. None of these circuits can serve as a reference for Montreal because they are not sufficiently similar."

Mark Slade, Engineer, West McLaren Mercedes: "We had been working very hard on the car until the last minute of testing and over the whole weekend to improve its performance. Fortunately by the end of the warm up we started to get more confident, finding better solutions for our problems. We were even making changes on the way to the grid and the whole package seemed to work very well all through the race."

Dry tyre test at Fiorano In collaboration with Ferrari, Bridgestone will be continuing development of future dry tyres for F1 racing purposes at the Italian track of Fiorano this week. It will be only a one day test.

TEMPERATURES        AIR                TRACK        WEATHER 
Morning                21:-23:                23:-26:        Sunny - dry        
Afternoon        30:-30:                36:-36:        Sunny - dry