Pirelli unveils new tires at Geneva Auto Show

GENEVA, Switzerland—Homologation, the process of developing and certifying a tire as approved original equipment for a car, has become a watchword at Pirelli Tyres S.p.A., according to Pirelli executives.

And the unveiling of Pirelli's latest P Zero, its top-of-the-line ultra-high-performance tire, is testimony to Pirelli's dedication to working with its customers to create tires that are perfect for a specific model of car, officials said.

Although the new P Zero won't be launched until early April, the tire already will have 56 homologations when it appears on the market, Pirelli executives said as they previewed the new tire at the recent Geneva Auto Show.

These homologations include some of the most prestigious cars on the current market, including the Lamborghini Centenario, the Pagani Huayra BC, the McLaren 570S GT and the Giugiaro Italdesign GTZero concept car.

“The P Zero is a product that perfectly fits our strategies,” said Gregorio Borgo, Pirelli general manager of operations.

“With the P Zero, we are able to develop the product with our customers to provide a customized profile on the new Maserati, Lamborghini and Ferrari,” he said. “We are selling the right product to the right user.”

Of the cars exhibited at this year's Geneva Auto Show, 51 percent of prestige cars and 32 percent of premium cars have Pirelli tires as original equipment, Borgo said.

With the introduction of the new P Zero, there will be 10 P Zero products on the market, Pirelli said.

The first P Zero was introduced in 1986, and the following year was made OE on the Ferrari F40. Some 80 million P Zeros have been sold since, and with the growth of homologations the company expects to reach the 100 million mark by 2018, according to Borgo.

Pirelli has some 2,200 homologations, of which more than 800 involve the P Zero, according to the company. It has averaged one new homologation a day throughout 2015 and into 2016, it said.

The new P Zero comes in three versions designed for three different types of car, Pirelli said. The first is for top-of-the-range sports cars, the second for high-performance sedans and the third, the P Zero Corsa, for supercars, the company said.

At news conferences during the March 1 Press Day at the Geneva Auto Show, various executives of prestige high-performance auto companies paid tribute to their collaborations with Pirelli.

“It has been a privilege to work with them,” said Horacio Pagani, founder of Pagani Automobili S.p.A.

“People don't realize the engineering that goes into a tire,” he said. “The tires are the shoes of a car, determining how, when and where a car expresses itself. When you create a car that has more than 750 horsepower, it's a very dangerous object. You have to count on what the tires are doing.”

Mauricio Ruggieri, head of R&D at Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A., said his company has such a strong bond with Pirelli that it lends cars to the tire maker—something it does not do with any of its other suppliers.

The shared expertise of Pirelli and Lamborghini allows the auto maker to create cars that reach speeds exceeding 350 kilometers an hour, according to Ruggieri.

“Our car is a rocket,” he said. “The tire is the only object between what we create and the ground.”

Mark Vinnels, executive director of product development at McLaren Automotive, noted the stringent and often contradictory demands his company makes on Pirelli—such as low rolling resistance and road grip—that Pirelli has always met.

He spoke particularly of the foam lining Pirelli created for the tires for the 570S GT, the car intended for street use that McLaren unveiled at the show.

“The tire, from our standpoint, is the single most important component on the car,” Vinnels said.

The tire Pirelli designed for the Italdesign GTZero, an electric Gran Turismo 2+2 intended to be both a high performance car and a family car, is an example of Pirelli's homologation work. The tire—21 inches in the front, 22 in the back—is manufactured in Rome, Ga., specifically and only for that model.

For Pirelli, homologation was a sensible choice, according to company publicity.

“The advanced performance and technical characteristics of today's premium and prestige cars no longer can be sustained by identical tires for every model,” the firm said.

“The ingredients of Pirelli's perfect fit strategy are dedicated technologies, processes and materials,” it said. “By blending these elements together, in accordance with the needs that each manufacturer's engineers identify right from the design phase, Pirelli is able to develop tires that are tailor-made for each car.”

Market trends dictated Pirelli's move toward homologation, Borgo said. The prestige car market is expected to increase sevenfold by 2020 from 2000, and the premium car market to triple during that period, compared with only a 50 percent increase in the standard car market.

Between 2000-15, new vehicle segments opened up, such as premium sports and luxury SUVs and electric sports cars, Borgo said. New markets burgeoned, such as the Persian Gulf and Asia-Pacific, and new players entered the market, such as Tesla and McLaren, he said.

Pirelli has the most homologated tires of any tire company, ahead of Continental and well ahead of all others, according to Borgo.

Only a small percentage of the public knows what homologation is, but car buyers seem receptive to the idea, Borgo said. In a recent poll taken by Pirelli, 16 percent of respondents knew what a homologized tire was when asked. However, once the concept was explained to them, 78 percent said they would be willing to pay more to buy homologized tires.

Pirelli has no plans to remove any of the other nine current P Zero tires from the market once the new P Zero is introduced, according to Borgo. However, the company expects the new model to comprise 50 percent of the P Zero market in 2016, and be the majority tire in the group after that, he said.

The official European launch of the new P Zero is scheduled for early April in Lisbon, Borgo said. The Asian launch in Shanghai will follow in mid- to late April, and the North American introduction will occur before summer at an as-yet-undisclosed location, he said.