Firestone Tire and Rubber Company

Wait, he has to throw the gun across because it's a corded gun? Yep.

Firestone.

Got Firestone

tires.

I used to get Firestone tires.

I like Bridgestone tires.

Bridgestone what? Bridgestone battle axe.

Yeah

... revenue into this business that, you know, we can afford to, you know, significantly beat the price of Costco, Sam's Club, or, you know, whoever, uh, you know, the Firestone store, uh, you know, Discount Tire, whatever.

And that's how we do it.

And it's a place-

We did it for 100, 100 years, right?

Yeah.

Send them to Bridgestone, Goodyear, Firestone, whatever it was.

Yeah.

to figure out how to do.

But again, even Firestone with all of the support that they try and provide, like I don't even know that they're that confident in the data they provide.

Like for example, you know, there was this new sealant that was down in turn two and turn five of Laguna.

Firestone has these fancy machines that kind of go over the surface and they can tell like grip difference and roughness difference and all this sort of stuff.

And they came back and they were like, that's going to be lower grip than last year.

You go out and it was higher grip than last year.

Again, not saying Firestone doesn't know.

It's just this.

I still don't know why...

I know why, and I don't blame Firestone for this, but I would like to see more tires on a given weekend.

No sitting around on a practice session because we only have so many sets of tires.

I think about the last race at Milwaukee where, you know, You've got guys going out on used reds because that's all they had left.

And I grew up in Akron, Ohio, in some sense, I say, because of IBM.

And what that means is that my father worked for Firestone Tire and Rubber Company.

I was born in the St. Louis area.

At some point in the 1960s, these big companies said, oh, we need to bring these machines into our offices.

I'm decided I'm not driving it.

He ended up winning and qualifying and winning on the Firestone tires.

So would that happen today? Of course not.

There's no way that would

Yeah, certainly.

And that was one of my favorite stories that Parnelli told us.

And part of it came from that picture of Pete's where, if you look closely, there is a Firestone sticker hastily slapped over the Goodyear sticker on Parnelli's car.

And I'm sure as soon as the race was over, because Carroll was the West Coast distributor for Goodyear racing cars, I'm sure that sticker got ripped off as soon as the car came out of victory lane.

Our bosses were generally fairly supportive.

If you remember the Ford Explorer Firestone.

Oh, yeah,

absolutely.

But ultimately, and I'm a big believer of this, number one, for both national security reasons and economic, you want to be at the forefront of technology because it drives innovation, but it also drives ecosystems.

If you think about the U.S. auto industry in the 1950s, post-World War II, where Detroit was the center of the universe, You had spots across Wisconsin, Ohio, Illinois, whether it was Firestone or Bridgestone, or Bridgestone's Japanese, but other companies in that ecosystem that fed into it.

Data centers are kind of the same way.

People look at data centers and say, oh, it's a big Costco box, and there's two cars in the parking lot, and all of that is being driven automatically, so there's no jobs.