What The Hell Is Pirelli Doing In Formula One?
What the hell is Pirelli doing in F1?
“We want to do F1 because its popularity places it as the number one motorsport category and it’s seen as the pinnacle of motorsport. For our brand positioning, as a prestige brand supplier, that makes a lot of sense. It’s also pushed us in ways we couldn’t have imagined when we entered F1 in 2011.”
How does Pirelli’s involvement with F1 translate to their street car business?
“The main benefit is the increase in simulation work that goes on
with our tire design, particularly in the area of structural design. We
use simulation in the analysis of our new tire models and how they work
with various manufacturers cars. It’s the exact same simulations we use
in F1 and the road car business is going very much in that direction as
it looks for decreased development times. Honestly I envisage in 10
years time that probably all types of tires for road cars will be
developed exclusively in this manner. F1 helps us to be at the leading
edge of that.
Using simulation for development also means when you
actually put the wheels on the ground of a new vehicle, that you get a
tire that is very close or is much closer too what the final product is
going to be therefore reducing both times and costs.
So our involvement in F1 does have a lot of benefits that are genuine
technology boosts that translate to the road car. That’s not a
marketing line. I won’t tell you that you can bolt on the set of F1
tires on your street car and go faster, but there are aspects of our top
of the line street tire (the Trofeo R) that we were using seven or
eight years ago in GT racing.
(Jalopnik.com)
