Homologation for the Pirelli P 7 on the Volvo V50

The Volvo V50 making its world debut at the Bologna Motor Show is the most recent testimonial to the fourth generation of the high performance Pirelli P7 range. This latest version of the tyre is designed to provide luxury saloons and station wagons with a perfect blend of performance and driving comfort.

The 2003 Bologna Motor Show established an important record for Pirelli ultra-high performance tyres: equipping the two cars that won this year’s prestigious “Most Beautiful Car in the World” award. The Pirelli P Zero Rosso is the tyre selected by Lamborghini for its outstanding Gallardo, winner of the Supercar category: a tradition that has seen the Pirelli brand dominate fitment on the raging bulls of Modena for many years. In the same way, Maserati could do little other than turn to the ultra-low Italian tyres as original equipment for its magnificent Quattroporte, declared the “Most Beautiful Car in the World” among prestige models. In Maserati’s case, too, collaboration with Pirelli goes back many years, to the time of Juan Manuel Fangio’s Formula One World Championships and even earlier.

It is not by chance that the tyre chosen for the Gallardo and Quattroporte is the Pirelli P Zero Rosso: the ultra-high performance tyre, created from the Italian manufacturer’s technology, has, for some time, been the point of reference for all the world motor industry’s top-of-the-range cars. This is due to the tyre’s ability to guarantee at the same time safety, performance, comfort and, more than anything else, versatility of use.

P Zero Rosso is also the best instrument available to designers with which to personalise their new creations, resulting in syntheses – often unique – of style and technology: a fact confirmed at the Bologna Motor Show by the new Pirelli tyres fitted on the Corvette Moray of Italdesign. The car is fitted with P Zero Rosso in sizes 255/35 ZR 20 front and 345/25 ZR 20 rear.

While the P Zero Rosso is the original equipment tyre, P Zero Nero was originally intended to be the ultra-low product destined for the replacement and tuner markets. But the tyre has shown such outstanding qualities that it, too, has been homologated as OE by a number of car makers: Jaguar has opted for the P Zero Nero for its long-awaited X-Type Wagon. And P Zero Nero is the tyre that will be fitted as standard – and has been, right from the prototype stage – to the Lancia Fulvia Coupé, continuing a tradition that has always seen Pirelli tyres fitted as OE on Lancias, first to the original Fulvia HF, then the Stratos and later the Delta.

After making its debut at the Frankfurt Motor Show, the Alfa Romeo 8C has come back to Italy and Bologna: from the earliest stages of the development of the model’s Quadrifoglio concept car, Pirelli P Zero Corsa tyres have been designed into this top performance Alfa. These are tyres that are the extreme option of the P Zero family, for drivers who want to extract the maximum from their supercars, including on the race track.

And then there is the Pirelli P Zero at Bologna that has good reason to take the top spot over all the others, having just become the 2003 World Rally Champion. It can be found on the Subaru stand, fitted to the blue and yellow Impreza WRC, which took Norwegian driver Petter Solberg to his world triumph a month ago on the special stages of Wales, to give Pirelli its 19th world rally title and its sixth with Subaru.

There is also a Pirelli for the 2004 Car of the Year: it is the Winter Snowsport, which equips the SUV version of the new Fiat Panda; a revolutionary and non-conformist off-roader derived from the Simba concept car, which made its first public appearance at the Motor Show last year.

Another car that has found its ideal tyre equipment in the Pirelli range is the Mini, represented in Bologna by its ultra-sporting form, the John Cooper Works model.

The two names – Mini and Pirelli – are testimonials in a new television advertisement in Italy, in which actress Alessia Merz invites motorists to take greater care of their tyres: a call for safety, which appears more than ever epitomised by the Mini/Pirelli duo. Pirelli supplies the highly successful Mini with its Eufori@ as original equipment: the tyre is a run flat, with self-supporting sidewalls, and is able to cover more than 150 kilometres at zero pressure.