As the FIA Formula One World Championship looks set to go down to the wire, Bridgestone Motorsport is ready and waiting for the final European round on the calendar. Not only will the Italian Tifosi be out in force willing on Ferrari on their home turf but after an intensive few days of testing last week which saw Bridgestone's teams cover more than 10,000kms, Bridgestone has good reason to believe its five teams will put in a strong performance at Monza.

Hiroshi Yasukawa, Director of Motorsport, said: “The Italian GP is one of the highlights of the F1 calendar. The atmosphere and passion of this event will be spurring Bridgestone on every inch of the way. It will be a fast, furious and tough race and in light of recent events we sincerely hope it will also be a fair one for the benefit of F1 as a whole. There is much riding on this final European round and Bridgestone has invested a great deal of time and effort making sure our teams have the best tyres for the race. Our teams and engineers worked extremely hard at the recent test and I look forward to seeing the results of that hard work.”

2003 Tyres for Monza
Approximately 1,400 tyres comprising of eight dry weather specifications will be present at the Italian Grand Prix, some of which will be flown in directly from the F1 production plant in Tokyo in response to last week's testing. The tyres will be from the harder end of the compound range due to the high-speed nature of the 5.793km Monza circuit.
Hisao Suganuma, Technical Manager of Bridgestone Motorsport said: “Monza is a very high speed track so we can expect heat durability to be one of the main issues there. Tyre surface temperatures may not be high when a car is running down the straights but the tyres themselves are running at a very high frequency producing stress inside the tyres which generates a lot of heat. On top of that, because of the high speeds, our tyres must be strong enough to cope with the high centrifugal forces which are experienced at Monza. The key will be to provide high grip with good heat durability. As a result of last week's testing we found some of the compounds we tried were both strong enough for Monza and also competitive. Cars will be run with low downforce set-ups which means it is easier to slide while cornering, which also generates heat in the tyres. Monza is one of the toughest tracks on the calendar.”