Citroen’s young Spaniard quite literally dominated the final weekend of the Bologna Motor Show. Sordo won both the Night Sprint competition on Saturday evening and the Bettega Memorial Rallysprint this afternoon, getting the better of Italian driver Gigi Galli in a Ford Focus WRC on both occasions.

Dani Sordo was the star protagonist of the final weekend of the Bologna Motor Show, dominating proceedings at the wheel of his factory Citroen C4 WRC running on Pirelli Scorpion tyres. The young Spaniard beat Italian driver Gigi Galli (Ford Focus WRC) in both of the main competitions held in Bologna. On Saturday evening, Sordo had the better of Galli during the night race known as the Bettega Memorial Night Sprint. Today, the 2005 Junior World Rally Champion once again defeated the Pirelli-equipped Ford Focus WRC of Galli, who triumphed on the Bettega Memorial Rallysprint back in 2005 and 2006.

Five-time World Rally Champion Sebastien Loeb started off the event on Saturday afternoon by completing several laps of the 1020-metre circuit in his Citroen C4 WRC-Pirelli. The 2008 Bologna Motor Show then witnessed duels between aces such as Marcus Gronholm (Ford Focus WRC), Petter Solberg (Subaru Impreza WRC), Francois Duval (Subaru Impreza WRC) and Kris Meeke (Citroen Xsara WRC). The Italian drivers included Piero Longhi (Subaru Impreza WRC) and Simone Campedelli (Peugeot 307 WRC). All the competitors used Pirelli tyres throughout the event.

In the Bettega Memorial Rallysprint, Galli’s Pirelli-equipped Ford Focus beat Sordo during their first encounter, only to lose in the second heat. When they both went through to the final, the Italian once again beat Sordo to begin with, but the Spaniard then answered back with a time that was quickest of all round the short rallysprint track. The Citroen C4 WRC – running on Pirelli tyres like all the other competitors – then triumphed in the final heat thanks to some superb driving from Sordo.

 ”I’m obviously delighted to have won the two most important competitions here in Bologna,” he said. “For me it’s a big confidence boost, as I haven’t won since 2005. Pirelli’s tyres worked very well even on this mixed surface of asphalt and gravel that was made yet more complicated by the rain. Adding my name to the list of Bettega Memorial Rallysprint winners is a big source of satisfaction, if you look at some of the great champions who have won this prestigious event in the past, and I hope now that it is a good omen for our 2009 season.”

Pirelli launches the new MIRS process: the mini factory that
revolutionizes high performance tyre production

The new technology is based on the exploitation of 3 Pirelli
patents dated
1975-76. MIRS will produce also a run-flat tyre with pressure
sensors

Milan, December 2, 1999 – In a multi-modular, robotized
area of 350 m², easy to locate close to any customer,
using a completely innovative process protected by broad patent
coverage, Pirelli is totally revolutionizing the traditional
technologies and methodologies of high performance tyre
manufacturing. The name of this new technology is MIRS-Modular
Integrated Robotized System.

Experiences achieved on the collapsible core drum covered by
three Pirelli patents in the years 1975 and 1976 have been resumed
in a totally innovative scenario.

The manufacturing of the tyre is achieved moving and orienting
in different directions the drum, on which the extruders
progressively apply the different components by depositing them in
the direction of both the circumference and the axis. The robots,
which hold the drum from a single side, allow extruders to follow
the entire profile of the drum.

The first industrial pilot plant using the MIRS process will
come on stream in the second half of year 2000 at the Pirelli
Bicocca plant in Milan. In the next months, a strategic rollout
plan-including North America-for the MIRS mini-factories beginning
in 2001 will be communicated. The total projected investment is
Euro 250 million (ITL 500 billion) over the next five years,
entirely dedicated to an increase in production capacity and not to
a substitution of capacity already in place.

In the MIRS process, the work of robots covers the entire
production cycle, from compounding to finished product, without
interruptions, without movement or storage of semi-finished
components, without waste of energy, at high speed: MIRS is capable
of producing a tyre every three minutes.

With its process, MIRS also revolutionizes the product
manufacturing procedure: the production cycle, in fact, is
continuously fed with standardized semi-finished elements. A tyre
is no longer assembled in discontinuous batches: it is built by
robots directly around a drum that the machines pass ” from one
mechanical hand to the next” , without stopping and without human
contact. And the steps in tyre processing are drastically reduced:
from the traditional 14 to only three.

Integrated software guides the robots’ movements, automatically
provisioning the materials, selecting the drum, assembling the
tyre, curing it and handling the finished product. Just tell the
program what type of tyre you wish to produce at a given time: the
program does the rest.

Three components – i.e. the reinforced strips, the rubber strip
and the steel cords – are enough to build carcass plies, belts and
beads directly on the drum.

The production process is determined during the design phase, as
all the complex geometry elements are built through a progressive
increase of their section by the winding of successive and
partially overlapping rubber strip coils. These coils are laid on
the drum during the production phase, with a variable and
prearranged orientation, through the same software used in the
design phase.

The program that governs MIRS is part of a software package
that, upstream from the manufacturing phase, oversees the
engineering process, back to the initial design phase. It is a
single architecture that, starting with the definition of product
specifications, automatically intervenes in mould design, the
choice of materials, the design of the building drum. The same
software defines the path driver for the MIRS robots and manages
their work cycles.

MIRS: a mini-factory plant with astonishing flexibility (a limit
of one tyre per size) that can be modularly located according to
local market requirements. It slashes costs, heavily improves
product quality and uniformity and transforms logistics from a
problem into an opportunity.

The investment for a mini-factory with a capacity of one million
tyres/year is around Euro 45-50 million (ITL 90 billion).

The objective of the process and product MIRS technology is to
offer the market, already in 2000, starting from Original Equipment
clients, a new point of reference in the High Performance and
Ultra-High Performance tyre segment and an industrially advanced
response to the requests of total mobility in the field of the
PTM-Pirelli Total Mobility project. MIRS generates an
ultra-low-profile tire with characteristics totally innovative in
terms of performance, reliability and comfort. On the occasion of
the MIRS launch, Pirelli anticipates the first three “concept”
tread patterns, and a prototype of a RUN-FLAT tyre with telemetric
sensors for pressure detection.

The product range will therefore be enlarged to all other tyre
production range.

The tangible difference in the MIRS process with the already
known Pirelli automated production process FLEXI lies primarily in
the introduction of a veritable revolution in the way tyres are
manufactured and, an equally important factor, in its extraordinary
production flexibility and its adaptability to limited areas with
low-cost, totally robotized modules.

The MIRS technology has been totally developed in the Italian
Milan laboratory of the Group also with the co-operation of the
Bicocca University of Milan, especially in the area of mathematical
calculation. The research program is partly sustained by the
Ministero dell’Universit e della Ricerca Scientifica e
Tecnologica.

The ” Mini-factory”

Tyres are still being produced traditionally in large plants
that can only become cost-effective when high levels of saturation
are reached.

The MIRS technology, on the other hand, is based on ”
mini-factories” strategically distributed over the territory, both
physically (a plant where one is needed) and over time (a plant
when one is needed).

The complete tyre production process is concentrated in an
extremely limited area, virtually eliminating the space required by
the enormous quantity of materials and products that must be kept
on hand for the standard process.

In the traditional process, in fact, only 12% of the materials
are in processing at any one time, while the remaining 88% are
stored, waiting to enter the processing cycle. In the MIRS process,
on the contrary, the input is transformed from raw material to
finished product without interruption and without the need for
semi-finished storage. This sharply reduces the lead-time from the
raw materials warehouse to the finished product warehouse: from six
days with the standard process to 72 minutes with MIRS.

How MIRS works

In the standard process there are 14 processing steps: a
discontinuous series of batch operations performed by large
machines that exploit economies of scale. Each batch operation is
followed by a period of intermediate storage: the components,
processed at high temperature, must be cooled each time, in some
cases covered with anti-stick compounds or protective coverings,
moved through the various intermediate warehouses, once again
stored and then sent on to the next step in processing.

In MIRS the processing steps have been reduced to 3: preparation
of semi-finished elements (compound mixing excluded), building and
curing, plus finishing. These three steps are accomplished with
small machines that produce only the minimum quantities of material
necessary for each individual component of the tyre.

In the first step of MIRS, the semi-finished content is produced
by extruding the compound in the form of a continuous strip: under
software management, each extruder or building machine specialized
for each individual compound participates in the production of the
strip, in the quantity and weight necessary for the various
components.

The second MIRS step is an integrated one: building and curing.
Beginning with the strip of intermediates fed continuously to the
system, a series of robots deposits the material on a single rigid
drum. In other words, the tyre is built around the drum as it is
passed ” hand to hand” from robot to robot, each of them
constructing a part of the tyre according to a path managed totally
by computer.

The last building robot physically ” offers” the drum with the
green tyre (i.e. with the polymers of the base rubber still in a
plastic state) to the next machine that feeds the curing press.

Tyre building is achieved through independent steps each
controlled to obtain green tyres synchronized with the movement of
a revolving multi-mould curing press. The latter is a true
roundabout made of six moulds which, revolving on its axis with a
rhythm equal to that of the building, allows to keep a ” continuum”
process also in this phase.

This allows a high flexibility of the product mix with
optimization of production efficiency.

The processing method is also new, without the usual curing
chamber that fills with steam to force the casing against the
mould: it is the drum itself that automatically provides the
necessary motion inside the curing mold.

Following curing, the same robot returns the drum to the
production cycle. If the type of tyre being manufactured changes,
the machine itself procures a drum of the new required size.

The cured tyre, meanwhile, has reached the final finishing
section: one every three minutes, without being touched by human
hands.

Improvements in Product Quality

By eliminating the traditional batch approach, the MIRS concept
ensures an improvement in product quality barely comparable with
the already high quality of products derived from the standard
process, and it also drastically reduces the percentage of
scrap.

Each interruption in the cycle, each “human” intervention, in
fact, offers a theoretical possibility to introduce product
defects: temperature excursions of the intermediates in the
handling and storage phases, the presence of assembly joints,
unequal heat distribution in the curing chamber, etc. etc.

The Ecological Value

The MIRS process also has significant implications in terms of
the environmental impact of the tyre manufacturing process.

The reduction in processing steps and their integration into a
continuous process greatly reduces the energy requirements of
production. In the traditional process, in fact, each interruption
in processing means an enormous specific consumption of energy for
cooling and handling.

By reducing the steps, energy consumption also drops due to the
simplification of the process and the use of local generators in
curing that drastically reduce the dispersion of heat.

Then there is the ecological value generated by the logistical
flexibility of the plant: the reduction in transport flows-today
tire manufacturing sets in motion hundreds of trucks daily just in
Italy-bringing a general reduction in fuel consumption and thus
pollution.

Cairo / Milan, June 14, 1999 - It is the largest industrial
truck tyre activity in the Mediterranean area.
Pirelli Tyres has today signed an agreement with the Egyptian
government to purchase the majority stake in the Alexandria Tire
Company. According to the agreement, signed this morning in Cairo
by representatives of the company and by the Ministry of Industry
and Mineral Resources of Egypt, Pirelli Tyres, which already held
11% of Alexandria Tire, will purchase another 47% of the company
from the government for an investment of about US $50 million,
bringing the holding to 58%; moreover, the acquisition of a further
8% of the company is foreseen in the brief term. The rest of the
company is held by local institutional and private investors.

The Alexandria Tire Company produces all-steel radial truck tyres.
With around 700 employees and a current productive capacity of
roughly 330,000 pieces per year, the Alexandria factory is the
largest industrial plant for the production of heavy vehicle tyres
in the North Africa and Middle East area. The factory has been
operating for about three years using technologies and know-how of
Pirelli, which has also provided specialized machinery, the product
design and plant engineering.

Pirelli will invest in the company over US $90 million in the next
4 years in order to increase its production capacity. Alexandria
Tire will contribute to integrate the Pirelli European production
with high quality products; moreover, the company, which is already
the market leader in Egypt, thanks to Pirelli’s expansion plans,
will acquire significant market shares in other countries in the
Mediterranean area.

” This new initiative by Pirelli” , stated Giovanni Ferrario,
General Manager of Pirelli Tyres, ” represents not only a new
important investment to further strengthen our presence in the
Middle East and North Africa, but reconfirms our strategy for
growth in the truck tyres sector. This initiative emphasizes our
commitment in Egypt and our confidence in a country characterized
by strong dynamism and important opportunities for growth” .

The Alexandria Tire Company factory is situated in Amreya,
Alexandria’s industrial zone, and in terms of productive volumes,
factory technologies and level of automation guarantees levels of
technological excellence in line with the standards of the Pirelli
industrial units. The factory exclusively produces all-steel radial
truck tyres featuring last generation technologies.