Michelin

Michelin first competed in Formula One in the 1977 season, when Renault began development of its turbocharged car. Michelin introduced radial tyre technology to Formula One and won the Drivers' Championship with Brabham and McLaren before withdrawing at the end of 1984. The company returned in 2001, supplying the Williams, Jaguar, Benetton (renamed Renault in 2002), Prost and Minardi teams; Toyota joined Formula One in 2002 on Michelin tyres, and McLaren also signed with the company.

Initially uncompetitive, Michelin's tyres became dominant by the 2005 season — partly because new regulations required tyres to last the whole race and qualifying, and partly because only one top team (Ferrari) ran rival Bridgestones, leaving Michelin's larger pool of teams to generate far more testing and race data. The relationship with the sport's governing body, the FIA, deteriorated from around 2003 and reached open acrimony in 2005, the company criticising the planned move to a single-source tyre from 2008 and the reintroduction of pit-stop tyre changes from 2006.

The defining episode was the 2005 United States Grand Prix, where, citing safety concerns, Michelin would not allow the teams it supplied to race. The company's share price fell 2.5% (recovering later the same day); on 28 June it announced it would refund the price of all race tickets to affected fans and provide 20,000 complimentary tickets for the 2006 race. In December 2005 Michelin announced it would not extend its Formula One involvement beyond 2006. The last race won on Michelin tyres in Formula One was the 2006 Japanese Grand Prix, where Fernando Alonso benefited after Michael Schumacher's Ferrari engine failed; this secured Michelin a second consecutive Constructors' Championship and brought its total since the championship's 1958 inception to four, the others coming in 1979 and 1984.

From 1972 to 2008, Michelin was the long-standing tyre supplier for MotoGP. The relationship frayed after Casey Stoner won the 2007 world championship dominantly on Bridgestone tyres, with Valentino Rossi and other leading riders complaining that Michelins were inferior; Rossi sought Bridgestones for 2008, and Dorna's threat of a control tyre forced a reluctant Bridgestone to relent. In 2008 Michelin made errors of judgment in allocating adequate tyres for some race weekends, and Dani Pedrosa's team switched to Bridgestones mid-season — a highly unusual move that caused friction between Honda Racing Corporation and its sponsor Repsol. Dorna and the FIM announced a control tyre for 2009; Michelin did not enter a bid, ending its participation at the close of 2008. Michelin returned to MotoGP in 2016 as the official tyre supplier after Bridgestone's withdrawal at the end of 2015.

Michelin's endurance involvement began at the very first 24 Hours of Le Mans: it supplied tyres for the winner of the inaugural 1923 race and nine others of the 33 entrants. By 2009 the company supplied tyres for 41 of the 55 cars entered at Le Mans. In 2016 it equipped the Audi, Porsche and Toyota LMP1 teams, plus the AF Corse, BMW, Corvette, Ford Ganassi, Porsche and Risi entries in GTE-Pro / GTLM. From 2019, Michelin replaced Continental as the official tyre of the WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, supplying IMSA's top three series with the partnership also including naming rights for the Sports Car Challenge series and the North American Endurance Cup. In the European Le Mans Series, Michelin has been the exclusive supplier of the LMP3 class since 2015.

In the World Rally Championship, Michelin has supplied the Audi, Citroën, Ford, Lancia, Mitsubishi, Peugeot, Toyota and Volkswagen factory teams. Its BFGoodrich brand represented the group in 2006 and 2007. Michelin was absent from 2008 to 2010, when Pirelli held the official supplier contract, then returned as an official supplier from 2011 to 2020 before Pirelli won the tender once more from 2021 onward.

Michelin returned to the position of the world's largest tyre manufacturer on 1 September 2008, after two years as number two behind Bridgestone, and has been the world's largest tyre manufacturer by annual revenue since 2021.

This article is based solely on the supplied corpus. No external sources were consulted; claims that could not be substantiated against the corpus were omitted under the drop-the-claim rule.