Bridgestone denies Ferrari bias

When McLaren switched to Michelin at the end of last season, there were murmurings that one of the reasons was that Bridgestone was developing rubber better suited to the Ferrari chassis, although nothing was said publicly. Since the switch, Ferrari has been left as the Japanese company's sole front-running team, which has further fuelled the accusations. So far though, Ferrari has given Bridgestone three wins from the first four races.

"After the last race at Imola I have read many articles saying that certain types of our tyres have been specially made for Ferrari but that is not right, " said Bridgestone's technical manager Hisao Suganuma in Barcelona. "Obviously Ferrari does a lot of our testing but if our tyres are good for them, then they should be good on other cars as well. Of course teams specify preferences but if a tyre works well on one car, it should also operate within a certain window on the others. You could see in Malaysia , where our performance was not so good, that Ferrari and the other cars suffered to the same degree."

Suganuma conceded that with Ferrari doing much of the testing, one advantage was that they tend to arrive at a race with a known set-up, whereas many of the other teams have still to establish it.

As far as the Spanish Grand Prix is concerned, he said: "We try to look at where we are weak and react. After Malaysia we introduced a new tyre for Brazil aiming at more consistent performance and you could see that. And obviously the Imola result was very good for us. In Barcelona though, degradation is much higher and we also know that Michelin will not sit back. You never know how they will have improved their tyres for this race."