With racing, Bridgestone captures sustainability wins

AKRON—Speed matters.

It's why you push technological limits—of racecars, sure, but also the tires that connect them to the track—at speeds topping out at 240 mph. That is, after all, the essence of racing: Being fastest. Being first.

Winning.

But here's the funny thing about racing: Winning isn't always about how fast you go. Sometimes, winning is more methodical—long term—and more holistic in its approach. For Bridgestone Americas Inc., racing is all of those things. Because racing is the innovative proving ground where sustainable technologies show their mettle.

With racing—NTT Indy Car and Firestone NXT Series, specifically—Bridgestone is redefining its material science arsenal, particularly as it relates to sustainability. And its racing tire innovations offer glimpses of the future—of what tires can do or be—when more sustainable materials can be affordably and efficiently scaled for mass production of passenger or commercial tires.

"They (Bridgestone passenger tire plants) may make 30,000 tires in a day. We make 30,000 tires in a year, so our volumes are a lot smaller," Cara Krstolic, chief race tire engineer, told Rubber News. "So when it comes to taking materials that need to be scaled up in an appropriate way, if you think about guayule—this is a great sustainable material, locally sourced—but there is such little supply of it right now. We are working on scaling it up, but part of scaling it up is to put up a business case for it."

With motorsports, Bridgestone is doing just that, making its case. And as it does, those Firestone Firehawks fitted to Indy racecars continue their sustainable evolution.

This year, Bridgestone moved even closer to more sustainable by addressing one of the most important—and trickiest—of tire materials, synthetic rubber.

"There is not much natural rubber in the treads of race tires, we use a lot of synthetic rubber. And yes, the natural rubber comes off either the hevea tree or the guayule bush," Krstolic said. "But how do we get something that is synthetic or primarily fossil-based and turn that into something that is sustainable?"

How? You rethink your polymer, starting with the monomer. And you do that by leaning into innovative partnerships to make that happen.

"We reached out to our partner in Shell, and we talked about some of the main monomers that go into our polymers. We asked if they had anything on the horizon that we could work with them on to either develop or help scale up," Krstolic said.

It just so happened, Shell did. The chemical supplier was working on perfecting the use of post-consumer plastics—shopping bags and packaging films—as a butadiene feedstock. And it was a plan that fit right into the motorsports team's vision for more sustainable manufacturing.

In May, Bridgestone debuted its new generation, more sustainable Firehawk tires—tires made with post-consumer-plastics-sourced butadiene.

"When you are putting a polymer together, the polymer doesn't care where the monomers come from," Krstolic said. "Butadiene is butadiene. It doesn't matter the source."

Ultimately, that's the key for more sustainable tire materials and more sustainable tire manufacturing—adapting without compromise. Safety and performance must be maintained, if not improved.

And nobody can attest to maintained or improved tire performance like racecar drivers. If the race tire development team tinkers with the tire's materials or engineering and that change at all impacts the tire's performance, the drivers feel it.

"Race drivers are very sensitive to any sort of little change in the tire, whether it is a material supplier or a slightly different weave of a fabric, they are very, very sensitive," Krstolic said. "So we want to make sure when we introduce things, we keep the durability, the dependability, that predictability that comes with the Firestone Firehawk race tire.

" … We want to introduce things, but we want to do that in a manner that has the least effect on the tire and the tire performance itself. And then we can start to scale up."

Before tackling synthetic rubber, Bridgestone bet on guayule. It was a move that its Firehawk race tires proved could be paying out.

Last year, Bridgestone demonstrated the use of guayule as a viable alternative natural rubber by fully replacing the hevea-derived rubber in the Firestone Firehawk sidewalls with that of the resilient desert shrub.

It was one of the first, small steps in a much bigger sustainability journey for the motorsports team and the company overall.

"I have a graph that has milestone dates and steps and what we need to do to get to that next material circularity in our race tires," Krstolic said. "So we start out with things that affect the tires less. So let's take the guayule in the sidewall. That sidewall is very important to the race tire as it protects the outside of the tire and keeps air inside the tire, and has a lot of really, truly critical properties of the race tire. But the performance effect level is low in the sidewall."

Bridgestone believes fully in guayule and its potential. The company, after all, has invested more than a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars in the research and cultivation of the plant.

But guayule's sustainable potential also lies beyond its ability to expand and diversify the supply of natural rubber. Guayule is growing opportunities, too.

"One of the things that I am really excited about is that it's this little crop that could," Krstolic said. "It's a crop that we are working on getting people who are in marginalized areas to be able to grow because it has so much less demand on it as far as how much water it needs and how much heat it can tolerate."

All of that, Krstolic said, is important because sustainability is bigger than the materials themselves. That's why Bridgestone considers every aspect of tire design, development and manufacturing when planning for its more sustainable future.

And racing tires are no exception.

"You could do all the right things at one side and all the wrong things on another side, and (if that happens) you are not doing the right thing from the overall, big-picture point of view," Krstolic said.

So Bridgestone, she said, does its best to do everything right.

When the tire maker unveiled its more sustainable Firestone Firehawk tires at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway this summer, it worked with Penske to ensure that the tires—made at the company's racing tire factory in Akron—were transported to the track sustainably. To do this, Bridgestone relied on electrically powered 2023 Freightliner eCascadia trucks from Penske Truck Leasing's fleet of electric vehicles.

Krstolic was also quick to note that the sustainable footprint of racing tires extends all the way to their proverbial final lap.

"Right now, we are working with a company in Indianapolis," she said. "When we get all of our tires back they have to go through Indianapolis anyway, so they are sent to a facility that makes alternative fuel, and that is full-circle there. The tires help to power the electricity for the city of Indianapolis."

Because ultimately, winning on sustainability means taking a big-picture approach, one that builds upon each successful stride and positions the company to take the lead in the future.

That is, after all, the essence of the Bridgestone approach. And it starts with racing.

"We don't want to go from zero to 100-percent circularity because, not only would that not be economical, it also wouldn't be the right thing to do," Krstolic said. " … We have a long-term view. We know we want to get to 100. We know that we can't get to 100 tomorrow or even in 10 years. But we are working on scaling that."