How it all started: production gets under way, the first tyres and the first racing victories
On 28 January 1872, the engineer Giovanni Battista Pirelli set up "GB Pirelli & C.", a company in Milan for the production of items in elastic rubber.
It was the first factory in Italy to process rubber. Production started in 1873 with 40 workers and 5 employees in the factory in Via Ponte Seveso. The first picture of the factory is a traditional perspective drawing that shows the office building on the left, and the factory on the right.
The photo entitled Workers Leaving the Pirelli Factory in Via Ponte Seveso is the famous portrait that Luca Comerio created in 1905 when he pointed his camera at the thousands of workers gathered outside the first Pirelli factory. Commissioned for display on the Pirelli stand at the Milan International exhibition in 1906, it is a tribute to the manufacturing might of the company and to its development and robustness.
Luca Comerio, Workers Leaving the Pirelli Factory in Via Ponte Seveso, Milan, 190510 June 1907 saw the start of the Peking-Paris motor race: seventeen thousand kilometres on the toughest and most challenging roads. The Italian team, led by Prince Scipione Borghese with Luigi Barzini, a journalist with the Corriere della Sera, immediately requested Pirelli tyres for the powerful Itala.
Their triumphal arrival in Paris, one month ahead of the runners-up, became the stuff of legend. As did Pirelli tyres, which immediately became famous the world over.
In 1895 came the first cycling race to be held by Pirelli. The route was Milan-Cremona-Brescia-Milan, and it was open to all cyclists who mounted “tyres manufactured by the company”. These were Pirelli Milano tyres, with solid beads and stamped with the company trademark with the star and the letters “P&CM”, Pirelli & C., Milano.
The very first Giro d’Italia started from Milan on 13 May 1909, with almost two thousand five hundred kilometres to cover before arriving in Naples. According to news reports of the time, half the participants mounted Pirelli tyres on their bicycles.
A Futurist-inspired red car fitted with four Pirelli tyres: an illustration that soon became one of the icons of early twentieth-century advertising. The graphic play between the long P of “Pneus” and the long P of Pirelli had already crossed the Italian border, reaching out to many internationally renowned artists.
Stanley Charles Roowy, advertisement for Pirelli tyres, 1914What came next, between the two world wars, was a golden age for motor sport. Thanks to its innovative “cord” technology, which made the tyres more reliable and durable, Pirelli found itself equipping all the winning cars of that period.
In 1924, Alfa Romeo entered the world of Grand Prix racing, and found a perfect entente with the Pirelli Superflex Cord. With Antonio Ascari and Giuseppe Campari at the wheel. On 6 September 1925, Gastone Brilli-Peri won the World Championship at Monza with Pirelli and the Quadrifoglio car.