Test Tracks

 

VIZZOLA - Pirelli's centre for the scientific evaluation of tyre-vehicle performance.

Pirelli Vizzola is one of the most sophisticated centres in the world for the scientific evaluation of tyre-vehicle performance. The Vizzola facility is as much prized by the world's vehicle manufacturers, whose prototypes are often test developed there months or even years before they go on public sale, as it is by Pirelli itself.

Designed and developed by Pirelli's own engineers, Vizzola is a combined network of straight, twisting and circular tracks, covering about 85,000 square metres, a third of which can be wetted to simulate conditions ranging from light drizzle to a monsoonal downpour. Everything that happens on those tracks is controlled from a 25 metre tower, the laboratory's electronic nerve centre.
Vizzola is a key location at which Pirelli scientifically develops its tyres of the future, fine-tunes existing concepts and ensures the compatibility of those tyres with vehicles' suspension systems and steering geometries.

Control Tower

There is not a corner of the Vizzola track network that cannot be seen from the 25-metre high control tower, electronic heart of Pirelli's computerised open air tyre test laboratory.
As test vehicles rush, squeel and crunch their tyres over twisting tracks, straight tracks, rough, ultra-smooth, wet and dry surfaces, sensors, onboard computers and telemetry beam results to the tower as tests happen. There, electronic equipment elaborates the information as it comes in and, depending on what he sees, the technician in charge can vary procedure as tests progress.
At the end of each day, test results recorded in the tower are fed into Pirelli's tyre development data base.