Michelin: Next Year We will be Stronger

With still one race remaining of the 2001 season, French tyre company Michelin can already look back on an outstandingly successful debut year, with Williams, their lead team, already having scored four race wins.

But Michelin boss Pierre Dupasquier is confident that next year the company will be in a much stronger position. "Our lack of experience was a handicap this year," he told Atlas F1. "We managed not too bad to simulate the track conditions and understand our tyres, but next year we will definitely be more aggressive and even more competitive."

Looking back, Dupasquier remembers the Austrian and German Grands Prix as the two outstanding races, but for very different reasons.

"Zeltweg was our worst race," he says firmly. "Not exactly for the tyres, but the way we prepared the tyres. It was a mess. We started with new tyres and the degradation was huge, and the car began to oversteer. But that was because of our inexperience, we wouldn't do that again.

"At Hockenheim, we were really dominating. The tyre was just so well balanced, although you can't really separate the tyre and the car, but at Hockenheim the package was just so well balanced for the long straights, the breaking for the chicanes, and for the handling around the infield.

"If we had had this circumstances at other tracks like Monza we could have come first and second (with Williams) easily twenty seconds ahead of the field, but it is not easy to get the car so good, this is Formula one and it is very difficult."