Pirelli Motorsport (Geneva Motorshow 2008)
Geneva, 4 March 2008 - The 78th Geneva Motor Show opens on the 6th of March and Pirelli will be illustrating its centennial commitment to motorsport by presenting the Citroën C4 WRC with which World Rally Champion Sebastien Loeb and co-driver Daniel Elena dominated the 2008 Rallye Monte Carlo held in January.
The Citroën exhibited on the Pirelli stand will be fitted with the tyres that Pirelli uses in the World Rally Championship to which it is the official supplier for three years. The front wheels will be shod with the PZero asphalt and the Sottozero "Montecarlo" with light studding, while featuring at the rear will be the Pirelli Scorpions supplied to the registered FIA WRC competitors for the majority of this year's events that will be held on unsurfaced tracks. The teams competing in the World Rally Championship with Pirelli tyres alongside Citroën are Ford, Ford-Stobart, Subaru and Suzuki.
Pirelli is the official supplier to the FIA World Rally Championship and the P-WRC (for productionderived cars) for the three-year period 2008-2010 and within the ambit of rallying also offers its products to the teams registered for the Intercontinental Rally Challenge, the FIA Asia Pacific Rally Championship (dominated by Pirelli over the last two years), the FIA Middle East Rally Championship, the European Rally Championship and, naturally, a host of other national and international championships. Furthermore, the Pirelli Scorpion and the PS22 are also rally-raid protagonists fitted to 4x4 vehicles and trucks from major manufacturers such as Isuzu among the former and Iveco, Mercedes-Benz and Tatra among the latter.
Circuit racing also features strongly in Pirelli's sporting programme. As in the case of the World Rally championship, the Italian firm has won important and prestigious recognition having been chosen as exclusive tyre supplier through to 2010 for the American Grand-Am Rolex series, the most successful championship for prototypes and GT cars in the world. The PZero debuted in the series at the end of January in the season's most important race: the famous Daytona 24 Hours. As well as at Daytona, the cars competing in the Grand-Am Rolex series will be running at almost all the most famous North American circuits: Montreal, Mexico City, Laguna Seca (California), Watkins Glen (near New York), Salt Lake City and so on.
Pirelli's track activities are by no means restricted to the Grand-Am Rolex series. The Milan based firm will also be competing in the international FIA-GT championship it won in 2005 (Team and Constructors' GT1 with Maserati) and 2006 (various titles in GT2 and GT1 with Ferrari and Maserati), and will be supplying tyres to the new Eurocopa Seat Leon and major championships and trophy series such as the Ferrari Challenge Italia-Europa-USA, the French GT FFSA championship, the Italian GT championship, the Asia Supercar Challenge, the Langstreckerennen-Pokal in Germany and so on.
As can be seen, Pirelli's commitment to motorsport is as broad as it is varied and has a global scope. These successful ventures draw on Pirelli's great motorsport experience, its research and development activity, a true feather in the Pirelli Tyre SpA cap, and the avant-garde technologies that the Milan-based firm exploits to produce all its production and competition tyres.