INTERVIEW
Pirelli's Head of Global Marketing for cycling discusses the origins of the brand, its evolution from leaving the bike to its sensational return to two wheels, and the surprising similarities between an F1 tire and a Pirelli bicycle tire.
"In 1907, there was a car race from Beijing to Paris," begins Samuele, Pirelli's Head of Global Marketing for cycling. "It was an international race, with around ten or twenty teams and cars. The eventual winner was an Italian, who reached Paris in just two months, largely due to suffering so few punctures during his mammoth 16,000-kilometer drive over what were dirt roads. He used Pirelli tires, and that race and his success defined Pirelli as a motorsport brand from that moment on."
Pirelli was founded in 1872 and initially manufactured general rubber products before producing its first tire, a bicycle tire, a few years later. Before the car, the bike. “Yes, not many people even inside Pirelli knew that!” laughs Samuele. “But of course, once the motor car arrived, Pirelli’s main business became car tires, and with the race in 1907, the tone and direction of the brand was set, a racing focus that still defines Pirelli, most notably, through its long association with Formula 1 racing.”
Today, I’ve caught Samuele working from home in a holiday mood. Later tonight, he’ll take a flight to meet his family and do what most Italians do in August: head to the beach. There’s not a tire in sight, and the only inflatable is a beach ball. It’ll have to do.
“The last year has been a lot of traveling,” he says with a smile, as if by way of explanation. “Things are going well.” If Samuele is a little road weary, the blame lies roundly with the astounding reception Pirelli bicycle tires have received since the Italian marque returned to its roots and started making tires for two pedaled wheels once more. Pirelli bike tires are in high demand.
As they were in the era of Coppi and Bartali, when, as Samuele explains, “Most of the peloton rode with Pirelli tires.” Until thirty years ago, you could still buy a Pirelli bicycle tire. Then, no more. What happened? “It was economics,” says Samuele. “In the 1970s, we started to differentiate the business into too many sectors.”
Pirelli needed to regroup, and did, nixing everything that wasn’t working, including bicycle tires, marshalling its resources to focus on its core business of racing and automotive tires. For more than three decades, Pirelli powered ahead without making a single skinny tire. But the memory remained, and a few years ago, with the cycling market proving resilient, Pirelli started to explore what, if anything, it might be able to offer cyclists once more.
“Around 2016, before we decided to re-enter the market, we spent a year and a half completing an exhaustive series of technical benchmarks in Milan,” says Samuele. “We had to see where the market was and what the products were like, and examine what we might be able to offer.” If that all sounds too tentative for today’s rapid, idea-to-product lifecycle, it’s because, notes Samuele, the bicycle tire business is a highly competitive and innovative space. In short, Pirelli wouldn’t return unless it knew its scientists and engineers could develop something better than the market could already supply.
An answer wasn’t long in coming. Pirelli’s tests demonstrated that the brand could manufacture bicycle tires that improved upon existing offerings, and in a way that would align with Pirelli’s celebrated spirit of innovation and R&D, benefiting other core sectors of the business along the way. Even F1. “Whatever the sport, weight, rolling resistance, and thickness are central challenges for any of our tires,” says Samuele. “I always make the example that before we came back to bike, the lightest tire in the Pirelli portfolio was 7kg!” he laughs. “And we came in asking for 300g and nylon fabrics of less than 0.1mm in thickness. It was those margins and the development that would follow that the company felt might benefit our other segments.”
As a solely consumer-facing brand, Pirelli also felt that the cycling market, where riders themselves drive demand, was a natural fit for the brand. “We don’t make industrial products, as most of our competitors do. We’re strictly commercial. In that way, we felt that the bike sector would perfectly align with the ethos of our automotive and moto sectors.”
When was the last time you browsed for a new car tire, examined brands, and read reviews? Probably never. You let the auto shop pick them. But a bike tire? “Cyclists do so much research on their tires,” says Samuele. “They read reviews, talk to other riders, and when they’re ready to buy, they order them from a website and have them delivered to their door, whereupon they fit them to their bikes. Cycling is intensely consumer-led in a way that Pirelli felt might later inform its operations in other markets. We had a lot to learn from cycling and all the more reason to re-enter the fray.”
The demand, though, would be key. With little hope of large volumes to start with, Pirelli opted for a hybrid model, assembling its tires at a competitor’s factory, with all of the R&D undertaken internally by Pirelli, and only the essential ingredient of the rubber tread pattern, created, mixed and made in-house by Pirelli before it too was shipped off for assembly. “Everybody in the rubber world, whether it’s a shoe or a tire, keeps their mixture a mystery,” says Samuele. “Nobody wants to reveal their secret sauce!” Two and a half years later, the success of Pirelli’s return to the cycling market was so evident that in 2022, the brand established its own factory in Italy, dedicated to producing bicycle tires from research and development to rubber on the road.
SAMUELE BRESSAN
Was it a surprise that Pirelli’s first bike tires gained so much traction so quickly? “Yes,” says Samuele. “And I was someone who had long experience in the bike industry and knew how competitive and product-driven the market was and is. And saturated. There are a lot of tire brands.”
The area that drove the growth was road cycling, a natural arena for Pirelli given its Formula 1 pedigree. “The P-Zero Velo, as it was known at the time, really surprised us,” remembers Samuele. “It became an instant hit.” Developing the tire took Pirelli on a journey that spanned the length of Italy, from the foothills of the Alps in Milan, with its chemists, engineers and the myriad people, skills and facilities needed to imagine and manufacture the actual tires, to the top of Europe’s highest volcano, and a cycling squad that Samuele gives equal credit for helping to make Pirelli’s debut bike tire a success. “In Sicily, we have a team of field testers who work full-time to objectively and subjectively evaluate our bike tires,” he begins. “Their job is to identify the characteristics – there are twelve in total – such as grip, handling, braking and so forth. For each of these characteristics, they have protocols that enable them to replicate the same tests in the same environment. Those are the objective tests, but there is also a suite of subjective tests completed in blind test conditions.” Hopefully not the eyes. “No!” he laughs. “But it’s a dream job if you are a cyclist. They ride about 20,000 km a year.”
As Samuele notes, these tests are the only way to reliably test a tire to a level that exceeds the demands of professional cyclists, as well as tune the ride feel to elicit the sensations Pirelli’s engineers hope to create through their lab work. And to that, Samuele makes special mention of how very sensitive his field testers are, able to discern even the slightest change in a tire, for good or ill. While years in the making, Samuele says that the reward was revealed in the first 100 meters. “Everyone reported how amazing the tire felt for the first 100 meters, how fast, how comfortable.” And that, he notes, was all down to the ability of the field testers to communicate their feedback back to Pirelli’s R&D department, driving the right choices to create the best compromise between objective data, the racing perspective and the needs of the average rider, Pirelli’s intended consumer.
“The other part that is very important,” Samuele adds, “is that when you define the product that you want, even with a brand like Pirelli that has such a strong identity and product expectation, you still have to define very carefully what you want from the tire.” And getting what it wanted was made a lot easier for Pirelli by managing the test conditions. “The test center is right up against the volcano of Mt. Etna,” says Samuele. “It’s dry, with lots of variation in altitude and temperature, and quality of asphalt, with smooth roads and more abrasive ones all within easy reach. And conditions that vary from 40 degrees at sea level down to almost 0 degrees at the top of the mountain.”
Samuele is playing it cool, but as he talks, one can only infer that the pressure was on. This is Pirelli we’re talking about – no power without control. Had the first bike tire not been exceptional and positively impacted the brand, Samuele’s small team risked unsettling the giant that is Pirelli’s car and moto business. “Failing was not an option,” he admits. “The risk was loss of car tire sales, not that bike tires would not have worked. Our company turns over 7 billion a year – the only effect we can have is reputational!”
But what makes a good bike tire? Is it the rubber, the sidewalls? “First of all, I would say it’s the development methodology,” says Samuele. “And by that we mean the desired characteristics of the tire and the decisions that go into it realizing that vision. Then, balancing all of the variables and how various elements interact with each other in order to reach data and an objective performance measurement. It’s very scientific, but that’s how Pirelli works. Obviously, it’s a critical approach in sports like Formula One.”
Let’s talk about F1 for a moment. And to ask a stupid question, how different is a bike tire from a Formula One tire? “Surprisingly, not that different,” he smiles. Clearly, he’s been asked this before. “The rubber formulation is quite similar, for example. And even though the car has an engine that generates an incredible amount of torque, which places enormous mechanical stress on the rubber, the contact patch and the pressure distribution of the tire are quite large. A bicycle tire, though, has a tiny contact patch, so while the mechanical stress that goes into the tire is much less than that of a car, it’s focused on a far smaller area. Still, when you take into account the weight differential between a Formula One car and a bicycle, the total stress on the car’s tire is only around three times more than a bicycle tire.”
The next time you watch an F1 race, keep your eyes on the tires – they’re your P-Zeros, only a lot faster. “And hotter!” adds Samuele. “The working temperature of an F1 tire can exceed 120 degrees Celsius. They really only start to get going at 70 degrees. Naturally, those extremes require a formulation that can perform under such conditions.” But on the bike, even on the punchiest ride or the heaviest descent, according to Samuele, a Pirelli bicycle tire will only ever experience a temperature change of 1 or 2 degrees. “For a cyclist, the environmental temperature is much more of a factor than any stress the rider can put through their tires.”
To finish the F1 link and finally let Samuele reach the beach, I ask him whether the development that has gone into Pirelli’s bicycle tires is feeding back into the top tier of motorsport. “Hmm, we are entering an area where I cannot say much,” he says, looking serious for a moment. “Let’s just say that in areas of rolling resistance and grip, cycling is a punishing discipline that demands a lot from the tires. Those challenges offer a lot of insight that may well benefit other areas of our business.”
Intriguing stuff. But we can’t let Samuele stretch out on the lounger just yet, not without asking about the current width of bike tires, and the trend of ‘wider is better’. “Well, we were the first brand to release a road cycling, high-performance tire in 40mm width – our P-Zero,” he notes. “It became a best seller in the US after only a month. We saw the trend and pushed ahead of the demand, and we saw the market reaction. The same applies to our slick endurance tire, the Evo, which will soon be available in a 55mm variant.” Wider, though, means heavier. Is that a concern? “The reality is that in any rolling equipment, the weight is only detrimental when you have to change speed – like accelerating,” he counters. “A lightweight tire offers many benefits, but only where a change in speed is required or when the road turns upwards with a change of elevation. Once you’re at speed, the weight of your tire isn’t a factor.”
As an encore of sorts, our conversation about weight segues to puncture protection and material development. And here, Samuele has some interesting points to make. “It’s easy to forget that the rubber – the top surface of the tire – is the first line of defence against punctures,” he begins. “If we can improve the strength of the rubber so that it’s more difficult to penetrate, we can offer far higher puncture protection. And that speaks to one of Pirelli’s core differentiating points: we really go deep on the chemistry, which finds expression in material research, like blending polymers with certain attributes with other polymers in chains to create a material with vastly different characteristics, which might surface as a rubber that rolls just as well, but is far harder to penetrate.”
Ultimately, though, as Samuele neatly concludes, the soul of Pirelli is speed. “Handling is everything. If we can create a tire that invites you to greater speed because you have more confidence and control, we will have honored the Pirelli name. If we can inspire you, we have done our job!”
Consider us inspired.
