Ed Straw

I think generally Michelin is a bit of a gold standard as a tyre company in motorsport, isn't it?

Yeah, exactly.

Pirelli does a lot.

They come up with very good products.

But Michelin...

does have that little bit of edge I don't think it was quite what F1 was looking for not least in terms of the wider commercial terms because there's a lot going on in that Pirelli deal so I think you would have never got Michelin to buy into some of the high deg stuff and that was that was one of the talking points in terms of you want to try and control race like that to be honest F1 might have been better off without becoming obsessed with trying to engineer that because it's really really hard to do

And, yeah, I think Michelin's always a positive, but it was quite a late thing that they were doing here.

So it always seemed pretty unlikely, given how advanced the Prelli thing was, and there was also trackside signage and all these.

These deals are always way more complicated than just, oh, we're going to supply your championship, because they've got deals with the teams, trackside advertising, all these things.

What are you going to do to promote F1, et cetera?

What's it worth to the bottom line?

That would have been an important question.

uh thing but yeah it's an interesting fork in the road but i suspect again it's a little bit like art i'm not sure they'd have delivered on what f1 felt they wanted did f1 know they wanted that at this point because we're a couple of weeks before the canadian grand prix aren't we where the tires fall apart

Yeah, well, obviously Michelin always wanted a very technically driven thing.

I think there were ideas about what you wanted from a single tyre manufacturer because they're still producing, you know, trying to produce the target letters and that kind of thing that we talk about today.

But yeah, it's true that Montreal was kind of the light bulb moment where you decided, oh, this is exactly what we want.

But...

The other problem is you would also want a tyre company that will commit to producing a product that does what you want for the amount of money.

And I'm not sure exactly what the financials of the Michelin side would be, and obviously they're talking revised offers, etc.

But I know the Pirelli deal was very attractive commercially.