Pirelli motorsport starts and stripes
Pirelli is involved in 10 major championships at the forefront of American motorsport, with 40 Pirelli personnel committed to almost 100 races throughout the year, supplying tens of thousands of tires.
This is the scale of Pirelli's involvement in racing competition this year in North America, with a motorsport history that stretches back from more than a century but has never been more relevant. This will be a particularly significant season for Pirelli, which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year, having been originally founded on January 28, 1872.
Motorsport represents an essential part of the Italian firm's research and development program, as an open-air testing laboratory. This is why Pirelli places such an emphasis on motorsport in every global territory, as it is only by pushing the extremes of performance on track that the best Ultra High-Performance tires are created for the road.
As well as supplying more than 220 car racing championships worldwide, Pirelli is one of the companies that invests most into research and development through motorsport, in order for the competition product to be as closely aligned to road car tires as possible.
TRANS AM AND SVRA
With the aim of bringing its Motorsport tires even closer to the road tire production process, in line with what has been done in Formula One as well, Pirelli North America will introduce 18-inch tires for the 2022 season of the Trans Am Series TA class.
Indeed, with a growing emphasis on the technological, as well as aesthetic proximity to the road car product, the brand-new P Zero Trans Am TA class tires will switch from the current 16-inch diameter to 18-inch. The most significant change is the reduction of the sidewall, which now resembles that of low-profile Pirelli tires that for years have been the preferred choice of the world's leading performance road cars.
Trans Am will start its 2022 Motorsport season at Sebring International Raceway on February 26-27. The bond between Pirelli and Trans Am started in 2016. This championship is particularly important for Pirelli North America as it is at the heart of American automotive culture, with extremely close racing and very high standards of driving. As well as providing great entertainment, this partnership enables Pirelli to reinforce its links with iconic American car manufacturers, and further enhance the connection between road and track with high-technology P Zero products.
Together with the Trans Am races, Pirelli will be involved also with SVRA – the Sportscar Vintage Racing Association. SVRA, the largest vintage racing organization in the United States open to virtually any vintage or historic race car, will share a number of key dates with the Trans Am Series as part of the ‘Speed Tour'.
GT
On February 26th, in St. Petersburg, Pirelli will kick off also its season with SRO for the first GT race.
The 2022 season brings plenty of exciting news for the GT World Challenge, the GT4 America and the TC America series, the championships that go under the SRO family: there will be a brand-new track, at Ozarks, and a completely renewed range of tires.
The new DHF, developed to provide an even better suited family of products for last generation of GT cars, contains innovations in its design processes and materials, targeting increased reliability and consistency across the product line-up. The DHF also represents a crucial step forward in Pirelli's sustainability strategy in motorsports by containing more renewable materials compared to its predecessor, with Pirelli's objective of increasing the use of renewable materials by 30% within 2025. Furthermore, in designing new motorsport products such as the DHF, Pirelli has shifted more of its process onto virtual platforms, thereby targeting a reduction of prototypes by 20% within 2022. Last year Pirelli started to supply its motorsport factories with 100% renewable electricity and plans to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.
Once again, this year, the iconic Indianapolis Motor Speedway circuit will host the American stage of the Intercontinental GT, on October 8-10. The 8 hours represents the most demanding motorsport event of the year for Pirelli North America.
SINGLE-MARQUE SERIES
Key parts of the Pirelli USA program are also the P Zero-equipped single-make championships from Ferrari (Ferrari Challenge) and Lamborghini (Lamborghini Super Trofeo), which have become iconic fixtures on the American motorsport calendar.
Both in America and the rest of the world, motorsport starts right now. There are more than 300 Pirelli championships on two wheels and four throughout the world – can you keep up?