A selection of tires sit in a shaded corner of the office. Given Forza's big push on tire simulation this year I thought it'd be interesting to get Yamauchi's take on how important it is in simulation (Gran Turismo has its own partnership with Yokohoma), and whether the suspension upgrades brought through Polyphony's partnership with KW are worth more when it comes to recreating the feel of a car. "There's a limit to what you can gain from just measuring tires," he said.
"You can place a tire on a tire bench to measure its characteristics, and you get a variety of data from that test, but that tire's not exactly the same as a tire that's in an actual race and is heated under those stress conditions. On the other hand we drive the real cars, so we have this immense amount of logging data that came off the cars. We also have a simulator. And it's all about how we balance that triangle between the three. And what we do is exactly the same as what a company like Red Bull Racing does with their cars - they also try to balance that triangle between all three. All the top F1 teams try to do that, but it still results in a huge difference between the teams. There are so many factors, and there are unknowns that aren't really clear."