Pirelli is involved in 10 major championships at the forefront of American motorsport. It commits 40 personnel to a variety of races and rallies every weekend, supplying tens of thousands of tyres. The scale of Pirelli’s competition involvement this year in North America shows, the company states, that motorsport on the continent has never been more relevant. This is because motorsport represents a part of the Italian company’s research and development for ultra-high performance tyres – an “open-air testing laboratory,” in its words – pushing the extremes of performance on track to create products for the road.