Pirelli Launches The "Designer" Tyre

Milan, November 18, 1998 - Pirelli has begun to sell the world's first " designer" tyre. This concept is called Author Design and - a fact which is even more unusual - is not destined to be fitted to a concept or ultra-high performance car: it is a truck tyre.
It is, in fact, a limited edition version of the range of Pirelli Energy " green" tyres for trucks.
On the sidewall this Pirelli Author Design, well-known designer Andrea Branzi has " written" a story: in hieroglyphics, it recounts the history of the wheel, from pre-historic times to the present day. Around the whole circumference of the tyre, in fact, are entwined 4,000 years of " transport" , from the Egyptian rafts of the Nile to horse-drawn carriages, from the locomotive and its plumes of steam to the Space Shuttle. Intuition without precedent: a wager won by the idea - which has always been one of Pirelli's strong points - that tyres, too, can be stylish.

This Author Design was born of a precise graphics project which won the " Design the Sidewall of Energy" competition, announced by Pirelli last year and aimed at the most famous international architects and designers. Twenty-two projects were entered, from " Snake-Snak" the snake by Giovannoni to Lovegrove's " Functionality-Sensuality" , from " Mantra of the Trucker" by Morozzi to the mountain landscapes of Sadler and the fossil " Traces" of Susani and Trimarchi. Andrea Branzi's neo-Egyptian won, " ...a narrative ring which serves to create a kind of progressive dilation of the symbols which, from inside the tyre, extend to the truck and the environment..."

A challenge, certainly. Made even more interesting by the need to respect the technical limits dictated by tyre production and by the competitious rules: thickness of the embossing, markings, the exclusion of the use of colours.
Technical limitations and not virtual ones: the project really was destined for mass production. And that is how it turned out: Branzi's graphics became " real" rubber, shaped for a " real" industrial mould and the tyres have already been fitted to a MAN 19.603 truck on display at the recent Hannover Show.

And, above all, from today the Pirelli Author Design line is on sale exclusively in Europe and South America at the premises of the Pirelli distribution network's top dealers in sizes which are fitted to today's most modern trucks.

" I have often been asked how children view city traffic" , commented Bruno Bozzetto, one of the 'Design the Sidewall of Energy' competition's judges. " Remembering the moments in which, driving a car, I have been surrounded and wedged in by trucks of enormous proportions, literally hemmed in and dominated by giant tyres which towered over me, my outlook was not, presumably, much different from that of a child..."