<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE (notabikerther4useless @ Apr 17 2010, 07:03 PM)
<{POST_SNAPBACK}><div class='quotemain'>So, all these offices have the ability to produce the overnight specials? Man, Michelin is awesome!
Why aren't they in MotoGP?
I'm going to start a petition.
To be fair as babelfish said at the time the overnight specials were a de facto control tyre for most of their era as all the contenders were on them, although some mid-field runners might not have been so on better equipment, regarding which you and I can think of at least one example.
Michelin also had financial/corporate problems at the time, and whether they had the resources to run a motogp tyre effort competitive with bridgestone going forward with or without overnight specials is a legitimate question; my impression was that they did at least wish to continue the attempt though.
Whilst bridgestone obviously do have facilities world-wide, I am guessing their motorsport research +/- tyre production is fairly centralised and not popular with the bean counters, and setting up a second facility in europe just to produce overnight specials for a handful of motogp riders would have been even less popular. I am fairly sure they did produce overnight specials for the asian rounds at one point in time. Bridgestone also have continually stated that research and development is a large part of the reason for their particpation in motogp (imo still secondary to their major motivation which was to beat michelin), and may well have seen overnight specials as a dead-end, even apart from technological development making them irrelevant as roger says.
