The Bridgestone tyre company have boosted BMW Sauber's hopes of springing a surprise or two in the 2010 season, after revealing that the Swiss team was the car that was best at looking after its tyres during pre-season testing.
The revelation, coupled with Sauber's rather perky pace shown throughout the four pre-season tests, will add to hopes within the sponsorless Swiss team that they will be capable of challenging the front quartet of Red Bull, McLaren, Ferrari and Mercedes GP in the new season, starting in Bahrain this weekend.
The news that the C29 car looks after the softer, grippier rubber better than their rivals will give the team greater leeway in their 2010 strategies. Though each driver still has to use both tyre compounds in each 2010 race, the ability to stretch the length of the stint available on the softer tyres could allow Pedro de la Rosa and Kamui Kobayashi to qualify on the grippier rubber and still run a competitive strategy.
For 2010, the top ten qualifiers will have to start the grand prix on the tyres they qualified on.
"We have compared many teams' data and looking at the quick teams – their degradation tendency is very, very similar," Hirohide Hamashima, the director of motorsport for Bridgestone, said in an interview with Autosport.
"Once they have the 150kg start weight, with both the medium and soft compound, then there is little difference – so we could expect a very close pace. However, Sauber is more consistent."
As to whether the Sauber car was easy enough on the softer tyres to allow for the team to exploit the situation in qualifying and the races this year, Hamashima said that: "Yes, it is possible.
"With an easy car, you can have the possibility to do that. Somewhere like Barcelona will be very interesting – because the circuit is severe and the softer tyre may only be good to get one lap time before suffering big degradation in the race.
"But even places like Monaco and Bahrain, which are very, very easy on tyres, the specification that shows the best lap time should be the best race tyre – which could make it interesting as well."
The Bridgestone data was welcome news to amusingly-named Sauber technical boss Willy Rampf, who said that the team would be looking to exploit this advantage.
"Our car is not too heavy on its tyres, so we can do reasonable long stints without killing them," Rampf bragged, "That will help keep the strategies more flexible, if you're not forced to stop by tyre wear."
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