Pirelli is having a rally good time

19 World Championships Attest to the P Zero's Superiority GENEVA, Switzerland, March 6, 2004 - By winning the Rally of Great Britain last November, Norwegian Petter Solberg gave Pirelli its 19th world rally championship. The latest in a long line of successes achieved by the P Zero in this kind of road racing. A long line that mirrors the evolution of motoring. With its techno-sport ingredients, rallying demands maximum versatility from its drivers, cars and, more than anything else, from its tyres. They are the products that clearly benefit from the "mobile research and development laboratory"-a term by which Pirelli has always defined its involvement in motor sport-that rallying represents. The marriage of passion and results between the P Zero and world championship rallying began before the dawn of the world championship for constructors in 1973 and for drivers in 1979. Pirelli started to build up its stockpile of world titles with Lancia in 1974 and won its first drivers' championship with Germany's Walter Rohrl in 1980. From those two dates, the stockpile has grown almost non-stop. World champions without a break from '74 to '78, first with Lancia and then its heir Fiat, the P Zero range of rally tyres dominated the sport on the Italian cars of the Eighties. On the driver front, more world titles came from Finland's Ari Vatanen (1981), his fellow Finn Juha Kankkunen (1987) and twice in three seasons from Carlos Sainz of Spain (1990 and 1992). Pirelli won numerous times in those two world championship decades, often pulling off surprise victories. Already triumphant on the special stages with the legendary P7, the sport's first ultra-low profile tyre, Pirelli won many times by setting in motion a whole series of tyre technological revolutions. Rallying still remembers, for instance, its tyres with a thermal tread compound, which, incredibly, did not need spikes on the snow and ice-covered alpine passes of the Rally of Monte Carlo. And its tyres' punctureless performance over terrible surfaces in events like the 1997 Safari are still part of rallying's folklore. They brought victory to Colin McRae and the Subaru Impreza in Kenya, and they gave Pirelli its 100th win in its long world rally championship career. Subaru, a P Zero companion since 1994, has also quickly built up its stockpile of world rally championships. In the last 10 seasons, Subaru-Pirelli have won the world constructors' title three times-in 1995, '96 and '97. In fact, in '95 it was "winner takes all," with the team's Colin McRae of Scotland also becoming world champion driver. Then it was Richard Burns' turn in 2001 with the various versions of the Impreza, followed by reigning world title holder, Petter Solberg of Norway. So much success, so much fulfillment, to which a long series of Group N world championships should be added. They also testify to the dominance of the P Zero in the production car battles of the last 10 years.