[CAR SPEEDING]
LEO PARENTE: You know, this Drive show is
all about auto racing.
Then what am I doing driving a BMW diesel with blue rims
around the Spanish countryside?
Well, we're here exploring the connection between racing,
motor sport, and production car tires thanks to Pirelli.
So we're not going to review this BMW.
But we are evaluating a special new tire, a tire not
yet for sale, the Cinturato P7 Blue.
Pirelli's sharing it with us.
AA rated in Europe, fantastic qualities, and a real
connection between racing and road tires.
And that's what we're here to do.
It's fun to drive the Spanish countryside, but we're heading
to the racetrack to drive more Pirelli tires on some
fantastic street cars.
STEPHEN ROWE: One of the single most important factors
is the process we use for our sophisticated road car tire
compounds is the same process in terms of machinery that we
use to develop and produce the Formula One compounds.
So the factory machinery is the same.
Clearly the ingredients and the processes, and then the
subsequent vulcanization processes, are extremely
reserved, but more sophisticated than what we
have for road cars.
The cycle of development for a tire, whether it be a street
car tire or a motor sport tire, motor sport being rally
or circuit racing, indeed Formula One most recently, has
changed drastically over the last five years.
We've used rapid prototyping technology over the years.
We've made tires.
We've tested them.
We've extrapolated test results.
We've looked at archived data.
And this was the traditional way of developing tires, to
build and to test, and to build and to test them,
obviously based on experience where we have 100 years
experience in building tires.
LEO PARENTE: Let's get one thing straight.
Every week, I talk all about race car technology.
Every auto manufacturer hammers you with the
technology in their cars.
But all of it means nothing unless they respect physics.
The only thing touching the ground are the tires.
And the contact patches may be as big as my hand.
This is the bottom line to transfer all that technology,
all that power, performance, handling, and
braking to the ground.
This is the bottom line.
STEPHEN ROWE: What has come out recently over the last
three or four years is an increased availability of
sophisticated materials, whether they be [INAUDIBLE]
materials or reinforcing materials.
So we have a lot of data from suppliers and our own
laboratory analyses of simulating elasticity or
robustness or fatigue, et cetera.
And then in the last couple of years, because of the Formula
One, we've invested a lot of resources, financially and
head count, into the mathematical modeling and
predictive handling.
So the cycle of development has gone down rapidly.
It's halved over the last five years.
Taking the example of Formula One, we have eight months from
signing the contract to the first checkered flag.
And basically, this has been the same time frame as the
Cinturato Blue.
We have Cinturato P7 already in production mainstream.
Big seller.
Very, very popular.
Referenced in the market.
And then we decided with all the data we had that made us
think we could make a better product in certain niche areas
for the consumer, we decided to go into that looking at the
European labeling system that's coming out.
We basically had eight months to develop a P7 Blue.
LEO PARENTE: When you think about it, a tire's job in
racing is pretty straightforward.
Each tire is designed for that one skill set.
Drive, intermediate performance, and
racing in the wet.
A road tire, like the Cinturato P7 Blue, is much
more complex.
Pirelli has 11 qualities that add comfort, noise, durability
in addition to the performance characteristics.
And Cinturato P7 Blue is focused on the most
intimidating of aspects, driving and
handling in the wet.
The wet handling challenge is enhanced by Pirelli's
objective to combine wet road grip with low rolling
resistance.
The P7 Blue does all that.
It's built for cars with medium to large engines as an
aftermarket fitment.
The initial turn in gave you a real sense of pavement bite.
The grip was progressive.
The limit was not a surprise fly away moment.
It was there to find and calling for you to read it.
Confidence inspiring, I find myself going quicker and
quicker into the brake zone, carrying speed and
especially power out.
STEPHEN ROWE: Cinturato P7 Blue had been tailored to suit
two or three characteristics that we feel the end user will
appreciate more, not necessarily losing other
performances, but enhancing the two principal ones, wet
braking distance and rolling resistance.
And it's true to say that some of the compounding technology
that we used more recently in Formula One are applied to the
tread compounds of this [INAUDIBLE].
If we can use more sophisticated materials, but
less of them, the tire is lighter.
It risks costing more.
But at the end of the day, a lighter tire creates a less
energy dispersion tire and also gives
more dimensional stability.
The approach to which we judge handling and simulate handling
is transverse to Formula One and even the most modest tire
we make for road cars.
We decided we wanted to come out as a technical challenge
to keep our people working and looking to the cutting edge of
technology.
Cutting edge of technology must encompass also the
factory environment in which the tires are made and the
people who make them.
So we gave ourselves an internal challenge, when we
knew there was a niche for the AA marked tires, to make them
and to produce them.
We feel that being the first people to put them on the
market, we expose ourselves to a lot of criticism and a lot
of examination.
But we have put our cards on the table, and we will see
what the market appreciates of it.
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