The amazing Cinturato

It was the engineer Luigi Emanueli, who spent decades at the helm of Pirelli Research and Development who, just after the war, invented the concept of “belts” to keep the radial ply stiff. The journalist Alberto Cavallari talked about this in an article in Pirelli magazine in 1954. “His most interesting studies in the field most closely related to tyres include those that ultimately led to the production of the Cinturato type, the structure of which is a successful combination of three fundamental ideas that Emanueli championed for many years: the influence of an inextensible belt on the life of the tread; the possibility of arranging the ply wires radially, thus maximising their resistance; and the convenience of adopting a special configuration for the beads in order to reduce the stress caused by their movement with respect to the rims.”