The Toleman racing team that lined up with Pirelli for the Formula One championship in 1981 was quintessentially English, and together they had won the European Formula 2 Championship the previous year. For the Italian tyre manufacturer, it was a return to the apex of motorcar racing after twenty-five years away – years spent consolidating its position in rally racing, where Pirelli was the kingpin. “Pirelli back with the P7” was the title of Fatti e Notizie, the company’s house organ, prudently adding that “… the participation of the fledgling team will necessarily be experimental in nature…”. Pirelli had been away from the world circuits for far too long.

An entirely British story, were it not for those Italian tyres. But the fact is that the English in Oxford love the Italians, and better still the Milanese: for the benefit of fans and the press, the “wedding” between Toleman and Pirelli was celebrated in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. Ted Toleman, the principal of the team, was English. He was the grandson of Eddie, who started work as a road haulier for Ford in 1926, first at Old Trafford, near Manchester, and then in Brentwood, so he could be close to the auto giant in Dagenham. As the Toleman empire of juggernauts expanded in the 1950s, his father Albert raced in British rallies. Also Bob, Ted’s brother, was into car racing but, in September 1976, he lost his life in a Formula Ford single-marque race. But a true Toleman does not back away from the risks of racing: motorsport is a mission, to be continued also by launching one’s own team, bearing the family name. And thus it was that, in 1977, Toleman Motorsport was set up in Witney, in Oxfordshire. The general manager, Alex Hawkridge, was English too. The weekly Autosprint, the bible of motor racing in Italy, referred to him as “adventurous, bordering on the buccaneering, an extrovert, with inclinations that hardly seem to be those of a Franciscan tertiary, thrilled by the idea of spending an adrenalin-fuelled weekend”. In other words, a flower-child petrolhead. Right from 1968, he was the Toleman brothers’ trusted track-mate.

The designer Rory Byrne was South African, but by this time naturalised British. He had graduated in Chemistry from Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg, but his true love was racing cars. Not just driving them but also, and especially, designing them. Because he had a way with aerodynamics: it’s said that, as a boy, he built balsawood gliders that were the star turn in endurance contests, performing amazing aerobatics feats before triumphantly disappearing into the sky. In 1972 he emigrated to the UK and found himself designing racing cars for Royale Racing, where he began to put everything he had learnt about the air to good use, and started out on his way to fame. The meeting with Toleman was almost inevitable, like an encounter in an English club. The engine was English, made by Brian Hart Ltd, which for some years had been working independently, after cutting its teeth on Ford Cosworth engines. Brian Hart came from the world of aeronautics from the glorious de Havilland Aircraft Company, but he had always had a passion for racing, from Formula Junior to Formula Two. The drivers were English. Brian Henton, a thirty-five-year-old from Castle Donington was already thinking of holing up for the winter with Can-Am, Paul Newman’s team, but he had been called back to Europe to race with Toleman. Number 35 in the season that was about to begin would be Brian: first driver. Number 36 was Derek Warwick from Alresford, who came from Formula 3. Together they had won the European Formula 2 Championship in 1980, with none other than a Toleman fitted with Pirelli tyres. Now was the time to make the great leap forward.

“Necessarily experimental in nature”, Pirelli had immediately cautioned. The team certainly was innovative, but this was its first time in the top tier. The Toleman-Hart Tg181 was heavy and not very reliable. In a word: it was slow. There was no way of qualifying before September. The Monza Grand Prix: Henton managed to get into the last race, and ended up tenth. One month later it was Warwick who managed to qualify for Las Vegas: pulling out of the race with a broken gearbox made it almost painless. Now there was light at the end of the tunnel. Then came the new seasons, and the Toleman TG181 became the TG183 and then the TG183B, and on it went. Warwick became the first driver, flanked by the Italians Teo Fabi in 1982 and Bruno Giacomelli in 1983. The first points in the standings came at last, in Holland, and immediately after at Monza, at Brands Hatch, and in South Africa. And then… then came 1984. That magical, exclusive British-Italian bond broke apart. Warwick left his place to the up-and-coming Ayrton Senna, and Giacomelli was replaced by the Venezuelan Cecotto. Then came the divorce from Pirelli. In May 1985, Toleman was taken over by Benetton: almost a Brexit…

The first issue of Vado e Torno came out in December 1962 as a monthly for road hauliers. It was the brainchild of Arrigo Castellani, the head of “Propaganda Pirelli”, who directed it until 1968. Throughout the 1960s, the covers featured stunning Italian and international cinema actresses. Whether well-established stars or just starting out, their close-ups were spread across the entire covers, and the photo shoots continued inside the magazine. Together they retrace the history of great Italian cinema from The Leopard with Claudia Cardinale (on the cover of the first issue), to the films by Vittorio De Sica with Sofia Loren (on the cover in 1963 for the premiere of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, in 1964 for Marriage Italian Style and in 1966 for Rosi’s More Than a Miracle), by Antonioni with Monica Vitti (Red Desert, 1963), by Pasquale Festa Campanile (who directed Catherine Deneuve in 1964 in La costanza della ragione and Virna Lisi in 1965 in A Maiden for a Prince). And there was Catherine Spaak, and Ursula Andress and Raquel Welch.

The new aesthetic of the 1960s took hold on the covers of Vado e Torno, just as it did on the pages of the Pirelli Calendar, which was launched in the same period (1964) in England, filled with the spirit of “Swinging London”. Elegant, natural images, never provocative, always expressing immense but simple beauty: the simplicity that, as Edmondo Berselli writes in The Complete Pirelli Calendars: 1964-2007, reached its aesthetic apotheosis in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up.

In its first fifteen years, Vado e Torno initially adopted the formula used by the far more famous Pirelli Rivista di informazione e di tecnica , also directed by Castellani: topics of a technical and specialised nature linked to road haulage and transport appeared alongside subjects of general interest and miscellaneous items, with contributions by famous journalists and writers. These included sport (with contributions by Gianni Brera and Bruno Raschi), cinema (with articles by Tullio Kezich), television, music and lifestyle topics (Natalia Aspesi, Corrado Minicucci). Many of the contributors also wrote for Pirelli magazine in those years. These include Giuseppe Gozzini and Luca Goldoni – who wrote about historical places and ancient roads – and Giovanni Canestrini, who wrote a reportage about crossing Africa in a truck. There was also literature, with detective and science-fiction stories written specially for the magazine by some interesting authors, such as Emio Donaggio, a pioneer of Italian science fiction, and Franco Enna, the pen name of Francesco Cannarozzo, a prolific writer of detective stories set in Sicily and known as the “Italian Simenon”. Then there were satirical cartoons by such masters of comic illustration as Riccardo Manzi, Antonio Botter, Giorgio Cavallo, and Jacovitti.

During the course of the 1960s, the look of the covers of Vado e Torno changed considerably, with the portraits of actresses making way for alluring models shown next to vehicles. The change was also reflected in the content of the magazine, for the news, entertainment, and cultural articles gradually disappeared, with more technical articles taking their place.

Coming down from the Ghisallo, he had no use for brakes on the corners. He would stick his (padded) elbow against the walls of the houses by the side of the road, use them as a pivot, swing round and race off. Because he was Tazio Nuvolari. “You should see him at times. He’s the personification of the devil”, said one who knew the now ex-driver well, in an interview with the journalist Orio Vergani for an article in Pirelli magazine of November 1948. Down he came from the Ghisallo in a Bianchi 350 Freccia Celeste in June 1929, on the Circuito Motociclistico del Lario. Winning the race, of course, and without ever losing that look of a man possessed that motorcyclists had in those days.

Take Miro Maffeis, known as “Bel Miro”, for example, so adored by the girls. He was the youngest of the three Maffeis brothers – the other two were Carletto and Bernardo. He had a (brief) life with motorbikes but knew the over eight hundred kilometres of the Raid Nord-Sud, from Milan to Naples, by heart. He had won in 1920 on an Indian 500 but even when he only came third – as in 1925 on a Bianchi 350 – he always put on a tough-guy face in photos. A sort of knight in shining armour, he was Bel Miro and he knew it. Sure, the bike played its part too: his Bianchi Freccia Celeste had a love match with its Pirelli Motocord tyres… What was so striking about these pre-war centaurs – half man, half motorbike – was their self-assurance. They looked straight into the lens, without hesitation, without any doubts. On the contrary, Erminio Visioli had an almost derisive little smile just after he had won the Circuito delle Tre Regioni in 1921 on his Pirelli-shod Harley-Davidson 1000, just a week after winning the historic uphill Como-Brunate race. In his crewneck sweater and Scottish beret – in August! – Erminio looks straight at the photographer Strazza for the article drafted for La Stampa Sportiva. Understandably aged with staple holes and a few rust marks, that photo is now preserved in the Pirelli Historical Archive. Bel Miro, also on a Harley Davidson, came seventh that day… Riders possessed by the devil “roam the world as though carried along by an impulse of blood stronger than the power of the mind”. Thus wrote, and drew, Renzo Biasion in “Ricordo di Tenni” published in Pirelli magazine in March 1949. Omobono Tenni, the retiring, taciturn idol of Guzzi fans, from Treviso but born in the Valtellina, had died a few months earlier while practising for the Grand Prix in Bern. In 1937 he had been the first non-British rider to win the Tourist Trophy, and the English called him the Black Devil. As a boy, Biasion had taken dividers and ruler to measure the short – tiny – distance the Devil had left between himself and the trees as he shot by.

Raffaele Alberti looks serious and warlike in the photo of 1948, which shows him with his hand on the saddle of his “Guzzino” like a gunner next to his cannon. To tell the truth, it was not so much a “saddle” as a thin foam-rubber mat he would lie on, facing forward, as he shot off towards the 1 kilometre speed record from a standing start. Alberti clocked up four in a row in February 1948, on the Charrette-Saxon circuit in Switzerland. And then another nineteen in Monza, in November, together with Gianni Leoni and Bruno Ruffo. Breaking records over the kilometre, over 500 miles, the hour, the twelve hours, winning all the way: on his Guzzi 65 – raised to 73cc but forever a “Guzzino“ – he never abandoned his Pirelli tyres. Alberti, from Milan, knew all about motorcycle engineering and was a great collector of records, while Bruno Ruffo, his “record-breaking companion”, was just beginning to taste success as he approached the age of thirty. Leoni, from Como, an old hand from the pre-war Italian circuits, was the third in the group of Guzzi record-breakers.

Brought together under the banner of the Mandello manufacturer, they would often be found together on the circuits of the new-born World Road Racing Championship. Ruffo and Leoni were at the 1949 Gran Premio delle Nazioni in Monza, for example, with the Guzzi 250. And then there was another Leoni: Guido, with his Guzzi 500. From Castellucchio, Mantua, Guido Leoni was born in 1915, just a few months before his almost-namesake Gianni. Talk about coincidence… And then there was another devil-driven combination. Raffaele Alberti and Guido Leoni both came to their death in Ferrara, caught in a huge pile-up while practicing for the Campionato Italiano Seniores. That was in May 1951. Gianni Leoni – the same age as Guido – died in a most tragic set of circumstances at the Ulster Grand Prix: in a head-on collision with his Geminiani teammate, whom Guido had gone back to look for, thinking he had been involved in a crash. That was in August of the same year, 1951. That’s the devil for you…

He would stop for a moment to breathe, and then press down hard on the accelerator. If he had had the chance, he might also have closed his eyes. But it was best not to, because the wall was too close. Far too close. A hundred times. At each of the hundred malignant corners of the Trampolim do Diabo, the Devil’s Springboard. For everyone else, it was just the Circuito da Gávea, but for the locals in Rio de Janeiro that infernal motorcar racetrack through the city was the Trampolim do Diabo: eleven kilometres of lamp posts and walls, tram rails, stretches of beach and sand, concrete and cliffs towering over the sea.

You had to hold your breath and keep your eyes wide open, on the Gávea. And, possibly, pray one more time that your Pirelli Stella Bianca tyres would last the course. Carlo Pintacuda was well aware of this, for he’d almost captured the Trampolim do Diabo in 1936 in his Alfa 8C, missing victory by a hair’s breadth. Born in Florence in September 1900 and World Champion, with Count Gastone Brilli-Peri, in 1925, with Giulio Masetti, who by 1926 had already lost his life in the Targa Florio, and with Clemente Biondetti, a Sardinian from Buddusò but by then an adopted son of the “Florentine school”. Carlo Pintacuda was one of a little band of foreign champions of the steering wheel who, in that fateful 1936, landed in Brazil to see if they could bring a bit of spice into the local sports scene. And with Pintacuda came the Alfa Romeos of the Scuderia Ferrari, fitted with Pirelli Stella Bianca tyres. “We’ve tested our new chassis with your new Superflex Cord tyres. We’re really pleased…” Ingegner Nicola Romeo had written to the Agenzia Italiana Gomme Pirelli back in 1924, when the “Casa del Biscione” was preparing to make a clean sweep of all the motorcar races in Europe and go on to win the World Cup championship the following year.

Carlo Pintacuda did not take his defeat in ’36 too well. On the other hand, on Copacabana Beach he had been able to appreciate the bikini flaunted by the scandalous French driver Hellé Nice, who was also in the race. But he had got his own back straight away, winning the São Paulo Grand Prix shortly after. Because the historic rival of the Carioca city had immediately put on a Grand Prix of its own. Too bad about the accident caused in that race by Elle est Nice – a nice Anglo-French pun on “Hellé Nice”, right? But actually, her real name was Mariette Hélène Delange – causing the death of four spectators. Victory on the Devil was close now. For the Florentine Pintacuda, the real triumph came in the following two years, when he emerged victorious in Gávea in his Alfa 8C in June 1937, ahead of the Austrian Stuck, and in the 308 in 1938. Devil or no devil, it was also thanks to Pirelli tyres that Pintacuda – often in torrential rain – always managed to come first and build up his fame in Brazil as the “winning madman”.

Sou momole pra falar, mas sou um Pintacuda pra beijar. I talk in snatches but I kiss like Pintacuda: so sounded the Marcha de Gago – the little stutterer’s march brought out by Armando Cavalcanti and Klécius Caldas in the 1950s. Carlo Pintacuda, “o Herói da Gávea”, was by now a legend in the Pais Tropical. And the crazy daredevil drivers of Brazil had become “i pintacudas”. Few photos remain of Pintacuda, who died in 1971 in Buenos Aires, where he had opened a grocery store. One, however, is in the Pirelli Historical Archive: we see him at the finish of the 1935 Mille Miglia, which he won in an Alfa P3 Grand Prix single-seater specially modified for him by the Scuderia Ferrari with the addition of a seat for the “navigator” – Marquis Alessandro della Stufa – and a minimum of headlights. As always, Pintacuda is wearing his chic white racing suit, with a cigarette in his mouth and a cocky air about him. Next to him, Marquis della Stufa looks somewhat out of sorts: maybe because his seat really is tiny, or maybe because night has come and he’s ready for bed. Or maybe because he’s just completed a thousand-mile race next to an authentic pintacuda…Standing next to them is an overjoyed Enzo Ferrari. Just for the record, sixteen of the first seventeen over the line were Alfa Romeos…

Corporate Culture Week (Settimana della Cultura d’Impresa) is back! The event, promoted by Confindustria in collaboration with Museimpresa, is now in its 26th edition, and will place from 10 to 24 November with the theme “The language of growth: business, culture, territory”. On Saturday 11 November, the Pirelli Foundation will take part in the event with a special open house and guided visits, telling the history of Pirelli and its most famous advertising campaigns from the 1970s to the 2000s, as told in the book “Pirelli Advertising with a Capital ‘P‘”.

Visitors will have the chance to relive the history of Pirelli advertising through installations and shows in the evocative former cooling tower of the Pirelli Headquarters:  from the TV ads in the 1970s to Pirelli’s global campaigns, featuring testimonials from stars of cinema and sport such as Sharon Stone, Carl Lewis and Ronaldo.  During the guided tours, the best pictures posted on social networks with the hashtags #fondazionepirelli and #SettimanaCulturaImpresa will be shared on the Facebook (tag) and Instagram (tag) pages of the Pirelli Foundation.

At the same time as the guided tours, there will also be creative activities organised for young children aged 6-10, with a maximum  of 15 children per group at the following visiting times: 10am, 11.30am, 2.30pm and 4pm.

The itinerary also includes a special visit to the recently restored 14th century building, the Bicocca degli Arcimboldi.

Visiting hours: tours starting every 30 minutes during the hours 9.30am – 12pm / 2.30pm – 5pm

Duration: approximately 75 minutes

Maximum 25 participants per tour

Free entry, subject to availability

Event must be booked in advance by following this link

Entry at via Bicocca degli Arcimboldi 3

For further information: visite@fondazionepirelli.org tel 0264423971

Going through the list of winners of the first edition of the Compasso d’Oro (1954), the prestigious award for industrial design, we find manufacturers of furniture, household appliances and sports and leisure products. But we also find Pigomma Srl, a toy manufacturer, which received the award for Zizì, the little monkey designed by Bruno Munari. One little-known fact about this is that behind this diminutive company is one of the greatest Italian multinationals: the Pirelli Group. Pigomma is actually just one of a whole constellation of Pirelli Group companies and affiliates in the sector of diversified products. This was the company’s first area of production when, in the 1870s, it started with technical and consumer items in rubber. The cables and tyres sectors came only some time later.

In the golden age of industrial design in Italy, at the time when the Compasso d’Oro awards were launched and developed, the diversified products sector of Pirelli grew exponentially, ultimately reaching into almost every branch of industry, sport and leisure, with articles made in a whole variety of synthetic and plastic materials, as well as rubber. Since that first honour, received in 1954, the history of Pirelli has crossed paths with the Compasso d’Oro on many occasions. In 1956, one of the winners of the award was the Cifra 5, an electromechanical flip clock designed by Gino Valle for Solari in Udine. A few years later, in 1964 – after winning another Compasso d’Oro, in 1962, for the split-flap displays for airports and stations, also designed by Valle – Solari became part of Pirelli’s Diversified Products Sector, which in those years was also expanding out into electronic and electromechanical equipment.

Also in 1964, the jury of the Compasso d’Oro gave the award to an important project for Milan: its first Metro line, the 21-station Linea Rossa, which linked Sesto Marelli to Lotto. Pirelli, and in particular its affiliated companies in the diversified products department, contributed to this project with a number of technical products for the escalators, pipes, and air conditioning and heating systems. But one product stood out, for it did much to create the image of the Metro stations: this was rubber-stud flooring, the first time rubber had been put to this use in any European underground railway system, and it is still used today in many stations. One important feature of the interior design of the Metro was the signage, for which the architects Franco Albini and Franca Helg, and the graphic artist Bob Noorda, were awarded the Compasso d’Oro. The grounds for the award were given as “the technological and dimensional organisation of the indoor surfaces of the various settings and the contrasting use of materials.” The rubber-stud flooring was produced by Società del Linoleum, founded in 1898 and an affiliate of Pirelli, devoted to the production of tough flooring solutions (floors in Pirelli rubber, Linoleum, Prealino, reinforced vinyl, and moquette), which became popular for use in public and private buildings, cinemas and theatres, as well as on ships in the post-war period. Another story in a sense linked to the Compasso d’Oro also involves Linoleum. In 1929, the company launched what might be considered as the Pirelli Group’s first company magazine: Edilizia Moderna. The magazine, which was devoted to architecture and furnishing, immediately became one of the leading voices in the cultural debate in the world of architecture and urban planning, together with the most important magazines of the time, Casabella and Domus (partly thanks to Leonardo Sinisgalli, the head of advertising at Linoleum in 1936 and 1937). Its role continued over the years, and indeed the Compasso d’Oro of 1967 went to the monographic issue of the magazine devoted to design and to the profession of designers.

Lastly, this overview of the Compasso d’Oro awards that in one way or another involve Pirelli would not be complete without mentioning the awards for lifetime achievement given to the great names of Italian design: Giancarlo Iliprandi and Enzo Mari in 2011, and Alessandro Mendini in 2014. All three worked with Pirelli and with its “Propaganda” department, which in the 1950s and ’60s was an amazing hothouse of creativity for generations of graphic artists and designers. While working in the Studio Brunati-Mendini-Villa, Alessandro Mendini created a number of advertisements for Pirelli tyres in 1958. In 1963, a very young Enzo Mari created the packaging for the Amica hot water bottle designed by Roberto Menghi. In the early 1960s, also Giancarlo Iliprandi worked on advertisements for a number of Pirelli products, from scooter tyres to the adhesive tape made by the affiliate company Ades Sint.

The history of Pirelli and the Compasso d’Oro still continue. The Pirelli Foundation as been acknowledged by ADI, the Italian Industrial Design Association, as one of the institutions of the finest Italian design, for its important projects to promote Pirelli’s historic heritage. These are the Red Dot Design Award 2013 for the Rubber Soul exhibition, the nomination of the Pirelli Advertising with a Capital P publishing project for the 2020 Compasso d’Oro, and the nomination of the project “Skyscraper Stories” for the 2020 ADI Design Index.

The Pirelli Foundation is taking part in the fifth edition of the Festival of Innovation and Science in Settimo Torinese, which Pirelli has supported for the past four years and which includes events such as The importance of F1 2017 tyres, an encounter between the former Ferrari driver Ivan Capelli and Mario Isola, the current Pirelli Formula 1 racing manager.

Chemistry hour is the main theme of the events scheduled from 15 to 22 October in Settimo Torinese, which is home to the most technologically-advanced Pirelli plant.

The Archimede Library will host the educational workshops put on by the Pirelli Educational Foundation specifically for schools and for children accompanied by their families.

The following will take place on the morning of Friday 19 October:  You Need a Tree to Make a Tyre for primary schools and Journey to Discover Tyres for middle schools. During the activity, students will learn about the characteristics and the origin of rubber, how many and which chemical ingredients are used in making a tyre, and what the main stages of its production are.  The children will subsequently try to make their own exclusive coloured tyre and customisable erasers using a variety of materials.

Children aged between 6 and 11 will have special activities in the afternoon on Saturday 20 October: Tyres in Colour! is the workshop that will show participants some experiments using colours, designed in partnership with technicians from the Pirelli chemical laboratories. They will then be able to mix the various ingredients together to make an exclusive new tyre of their own.

Participation in the festival is part of the Pirelli Educational Foundation’s programme, which since 2013 has offered opportunities aimed at promoting the importance of scientific research and technological development also among young people, values on which the corporate culture of Pirelli has been based since it was established.

Specifically, the substantial educational programme gives secondary-school students the chance to visit Pirelli’s research and development centre at the company headquarters in Milan Bicocca, where they can observe closely the different tests that tyres undergo before being placed on the market and discover in the chemical laboratories all the materials that compose them. The youngsters also have the opportunity to enter the Pirelli Industrial Centre in Settimo Torinese and the Milanese department that uses the innovative system of digital robots: Next MIRS (Modular Integrated Robotized System).

Participation in the Pirelli Foundation workshops is free of charge.

For more information and to check out the complete programme of the festival please go to the www.festivaldellinnovazione.settimo-torinese.it website

Download 5th Festival of Innovation and Science

The two appointments with the “La fabbrica tra i ciliegi” (The Factory in the Cherry Trees) concert directed by Maestro Salvatore Accardo who directed the arches of the Italian Chamber Orchestra at the Festival Mito SettembreMusica ended successfully.

The Maestro and the orchestra played in two locations: the Piccolo Teatro Studio Melato in Milan and the Pirelli Industrial Hub in Settimo Torinese.

Crowd-packed and warmly applauded was the concert in the Pirelli Industrial Hub in Settimo Torinese where  900 spectators listened to music by Bach and Tchaikovsky and the world première of the piece “Il Canto della fabbrica” (The Song of the Factory), which was played in the site which inspired composer, maestro and violist Francesco Fiore to compose notes and melodies and where machines and tyres became the silent backdrop during the concert.

The concert at the Hub in Settimo Torinese was preceded by the one in Milan on September 7 in the Piccolo Teatro Studio in front of  350 spectators.