23/04/2006
NEWS STORY
Bridgestone shod Michael Schumacher claimed a well earned San Marino Grand Prix victory from pole position today in front of thousands of Italian tifosi. It was his 85th career win and the 96th win taken by a Bridgestone driver since entering in 1997. Schumacher's Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro teammate Felipe Massa finished in fourth, giving the team 15 constructors' points. Michael Schumacher moves up the driver rankings to second. Next up for Bridgestone was Mark Webber who drove a very solid race on his latest specification Bridgestone tyres. He finished sixth for his WilliamsF1 team, three places ahead of fellow Bridgestone runner Ralf Schumacher for Panasonic Toyota Racing. Nico Rosberg crossed the line in 11th while Tiago Monteiro finished 16th for his MF1 Racing team. It was a frustrating day for Jarno Trulli who, after qualifying in the top ten yesterday, unfortunately retired with a steering column problem. MF1's Christijan Albers did not complete a lap after contact with another car sent him rolling but a “thumbs up” from the Dutch driver afterwards indicated he will be eager to make amends at the next race. Neither Super Aguri F1 driver finished the race, a frustrating end for them.
Hisao Suganuma, Technical Manager of Bridgestone Motorsport: I'm delighted to see a Bridgestone driver back on the top step of the podium. It was a tough race today but Michael managed to keep Alonso behind to take the win. It has been some time since our last win. After all the hard work and effort our engineers and staff in Japan and the UK have put in over the last year and over the winter they deserve this win. However, we do not wish to get carried away. We need to keep focused on the job in hand. Our tyres have performed well in the weekend's practice sessions and qualifying and we saw some fast competitive lap times from several of our runners today. Three Bridgestone drivers finished in the top six. However, we learnt a lot from the race today and we need to analyse a couple of areas of our tyre performance to see if we can improve even further. We need to keep pushing and working hard if our teams are to continue to get good results.
Ross Brawn, Technical Director – Scuderia Ferrari Marlboro: Obviously we are delighted with this result. Winning in front of our fans is something very special. It was a hard race and the team did a fantastic job in Michael's final pit stop getting him out in front of Alonso. We struggled a bit in the second part of the race as we could not maintain the pace produced in the first stint. Michael drove perfectly to keep Alonso behind and Felipe drove a strong race too. A fantastic result down to great work from the team, from Bridgestone and from Shell.
Dieter Gass, Chief Engineer Race and Test – Panasonic Toyota Racing: I think we had two interesting compounds this weekend. We seem to be on top of the warm-up problems and that was not an issue with the tyre specifications we had here so we are quite satisfied with that. We also saw that when we were running free at the end of the race we could do very competitive lap times.