Pirelli Interview with Pierangelo Misani and Paolo Brivio: Starting the Next 150 Years

The new Cinturato 2 is set to establish new standards among winter tires. Are winters still as harsh as they used to be? Do you no longer need to pay more attention to wet grip, mileage, noise development, and rolling resistance?

Pierangelo Misani: (smiles): Many questions at once and fundamentally correct. The choice of a grippy, specific winter tire like the Cinturato 2 depends heavily on regions and driving profiles. And as you say: A winter tire is never a pure snow tire, but a specialist that performs very well on snow - in addition to excellent handling properties in wet and low temperatures.

Don't customers and fleets tend much more towards all-season tires?

Pierangelo Misani: Indeed, there is a trend towards all-season tires, especially in milder climatic regions, and the path to this goal was not easy: It took an enormous effort to ensure that the 3PMSF symbol, the snowflake symbol in the three-peaked mountain pictogram, could also appear on all-season tires. Because they then need to have strong grip in cold, ice, and snow.

How did you achieve the difficult compromise of offering a lot of grip with as low rolling resistance as possible? Is it just the compound or also the tread pattern?

Pierangelo Misani: This is precisely the greatest challenge! But with new materials and digital modeling instead of the methods we used in the past, we can quite well resolve these existing contradictions in tire development.

Can you go into more detail here?

Pierangelo Misani: Without revealing any secrets, it is the precision that massively increases through simulation. Broadly speaking, we can increase our development potential by 50 percent because we can represent and simulate the smallest details from the start - and these make the difference! This starts with the structure of the carcass and extends to the smallest details of the tread pattern. Thus, we can focus on various topics, currently primarily on rolling resistance, noise development, and mileage.

Do you still need real test drives at all?

Pierangelo Misani: (smiles): Always! We can clarify many steps in advance with simulation and make very accurate predictions - but the validation of these predictions will always be done through practical tests in the future.

And what about the material side?

Paolo Brivio: Materials are currently evolving rapidly in all industries! This means that the windows in which tires operate are significantly larger. This, in turn, gives us more room to optimize seemingly diametrically opposed characteristics like rolling resistance, mileage, or noise emissions, while maintaining the same fundamental properties like grip or wet handling. The range of new materials spans from fillers and polymers to new compounds and recycled materials.

The latter are becoming increasingly important given the dwindling raw materials - do they offer the necessary properties?

Paolo Brivio: For customers and marketing, we first need to set standards. Eco-Safe-Design is our mantra and we do not compromise on it! For winter tires, this means primarily grip and wet grip. New modeling methods and materials give us additional opportunities to use recyclates more, reduce noise, and focus even more on sustainability. In the future, comfort will also become more important. And especially for electric cars: Noise! This is still an issue, especially with winter tires. That's why we developed the Cinturato 2 as the “Champion of Noise.” We managed to reduce rolling noise by up to one and a half decibels - that's a world of difference! But back to sustainability: We were also able to massively increase the lifespan. As an example, we are happy to show you wear tests with the tread: The new Cinturato 2 not only has a 30 percent higher mileage than its predecessor. At the end of its lifespan, it has almost double the groove and siping density. This means: Steering precision is maintained much longer.

So, you save material and weight and still offer more mileage?

Paolo Brivio: Exactly! We were able to increase mileage by up to 35 percent - this also massively contributes to sustainability.

To what extent do you plan to use recyclates and alternative or renewable raw materials?

Pierangelo Misani: Sustainability and ecology play a central role in tire development. The great challenge is to develop materials from renewable sources that meet the ever-growing demands for reducing rolling resistance, performance, and product longevity without compromise. Of course, the development of materials that are recovered and generated from recycling streams and then reused in tires also plays an increasingly important role. This is a key focus of development.

To what extent can closed material cycles be created in the tire industry at all?

Pierangelo Misani: It is a tremendous challenge to recover materials from a tire at the end of its life and reuse them in a new tire without compromising performance or integrity. Work is being done in different directions, but one of the most promising processes is pyrolysis. Developments are moving towards the extraction of oils and carbon black directly from pyrolysis and their use in tire compounds. They are even taking it a step further: one development goal is to return to the individual components, which can then be further processed into new pure raw materials.

Interview conducted by Gregor Soller