By Andrew Cutler
March 18 2007

The last that we saw of Scott Speed's STR2 during the Australian GP, it was limping across the off-track grass with a gaping hole in the right front tyre as Scott stuggled to bring it to a stop. Shortly thereafter, he told TV reporters that the tyre had "exploded" on him. Now, after a joint investigation between Bridgestone and STR, a spokesman for the tyre manufacturer is respectfully refuting that initial claim of cause. "Despite the large quantity of tyres used this weekend, we did not experience any tyre problems," Bridgestone's Kees van der Grint reported, "Scott Speed did suffer from falling pressure in his front tyres [but], from our and the team's investigations, we found these to be from air leakage which was not related to the tyres."

As the sole tyre supplier to the F1 field this season, van der Grint went on to say that, from Bridgestone's point of view, the Australian GP was a success and that the company gathered valuable information which will help them to improve the tyres' quality even further for the upcomming race in Sepang.