Two years ago, Sébastien Ogier was on the warpath. He’d had to stop and change a puncture on Rally Japan’s Isegami’s Tunnel stage which had cost him a shot of victory when the rally had barely begun.
“To be honest it’s a bit of a shame nobody talks about this issue with Pirelli,” he said, his temper fully wound up and ready to be sprung on the viewing public. “It’s just a joke, the job they are doing. It’s not serious.
“There are punctures all around… there are more punctures in one year than we have in 10 years with Michelin and nobody talks about it because there is a contract, there is a sponsor involved. That’s just not serious. I’m glad I don’t do the [full] championship in this condition.”
Two years later the same thing happened again, on the same section of road in Japan. But the response couldn’t have been more different.
Fast forward to Saturday December 7, 2024, Pirelli is hosting the biggest of WRC farewell parties – taking over the Monza Rally Show and putting on a demonstration of all three Rally1 cars with Thierry Neuville, Adrien Fourmaux, Dani Sordo, Jari-Matti Latvala and Ogier all taking the wheel. On Saturday evening, they all assembled to say goodbye.
There was the usual camaraderie, with Pirelli rally activity manager Terenzio Testoni playfully pointing out that Latvala and Sordo would still be hitting him up for some tires to fit to their respective historic vehicles. Arriving later than his fellow WRC protagonists, Ogier was last to grab the mic in Pirelli hospitality. He’d brought two things for Testoni: warm words that belied the Ogier–Pirelli feud of the past and a parting gift – his Toyota race suit.
Ogier gifted Testoni a signed pair of his overalls
Ogier, by his own admission, is often the first to raise a complaint, whatever the subject matter. Going full circle, he marked Pirelli’s exit from the WRC with a compliment.
“I’m always the one who says openly what I think,” confessed the eight-time world champion. “It’s true that I’ve been critical of Pirelli at the beginning – and I believe rightly so because the product was definitely not adapted to our cars and to the WRC.
“But also then it needs to be said when people are doing a good job too and not only critique them when it’s not good. So that’s why it felt for me that they’ve been doing a good development during these four years with where we ended up.
“I mean I still had a puncture in Japan, but I cannot really… it was sometimes hard to understand why things happened, but globally there was, for me, a good effort being made, and that’s why they deserved the reward for that. And that’s why I also publicly say that they’ve done a good job.”
This was music to both Pirelli and Testoni’s ears. When Ogier’s Saturday night speech is raised, Testoni cracks a smile knowing his team turned the tide after a difficult start to its most recent WRC stint.
“Ah, you know, it’s part of the game,” Testoni told DirtFish, “it’s nice to have a nice word from the driver who is an eight-time champion. So it’s also part of the job to sometimes have, like Séb said it, some bad words to Pirelli. But finally, he also said a good word to us.
“I don’t know any driver in my life, in my career, which has been all the time very positive. Not anyone. So, sometimes it’s bad, but sometimes it’s good.”
Until the very end Pirelli kept delivering new updates to its tires: a new Rally1 gravel tire debuted at Portugal earlier this year, despite knowing its shelf life was highly limited. Its focus now pivots to customer racing: a new lineup of gravel and asphalt tires are arriving next year and only a few days after its Monza party concluded, it’s off to work again in Finland to develop the Sottozero ice tire further.
“For sure now we have a different target, because when we did the WRC, the target was to give and make a product the same for everybody, which is not easy,” explained Testoni. “That is a quality [control] job, because the quality needs to be at a very high level. And then I believe that the teams, they found our quality so high, because to make around 20,000 tyres in one year, and then to make them all the same, that is really hard. But we have really good people in the quality department, which did a really good job.
“Now, the next target is not the quality, but it’s the performance. Next year we are coming to the European Championship and then we have a completely new product on gravel and Tarmac. And next week I am flying to Lapland to develop a new ice tire. So we never stopped.”
Its stump speech is a simple one – rallying is bigger than the WRC and in that respect, it’s going nowhere. But it’s hard to ignore the irony of its voluntary decision to depart the sport’s top level – it leaves with its reputation strengthened, yet bids farewell to a world championship which now needs to pull off its own turnaround.
Pirelli has supplied the WRC's tires since 2021, spanning both the World Rally Car and Rally1 regulations
A new set of regulations that lead to a larger, more diverse top level of rallying could potentially bring Pirelli back, but the WRC now needs to put in its own hard graft to get there – it will be, as Testoni says, “looking at WRC through the window”.
“The Rally2 category now is really good,” said Testoni, “For me it’s the right category if you look at so many customers. So if you look at WRC, it’s not WRC2 that’s a problem, it’s the Rally1.
“The problem is just Rally1, because for me there is not enough cars. For me, my wish is to have 15 Rally1 cars, and then at least 10 fighting for the victory – like it was in 2005. I know it’s a different period, but I remember in 2005 there were many drivers fighting.”
Monza Rally Show was a case in point. The Rally2 element was closely fought from start to end – Andrea Crugnola led at the halfway mark but had a technical problem, fell back and had to put the hammer down with an epic final stage push to take the victory at the very end. ERC champion Hayden Paddon completed the podium places and WRC2 champ Sami Pajari could only muster the top five after choosing dry weather tires when the rain came down. It may have been an exhibition on paper but it was treated like a contest regardless.
Last weekend’s Monza Rally was a goodbye not only for Pirelli but also the hybrid units that debuted in 2022 – fitted solely to the Ford Puma shared by Fourmaux and ‘Pedro’. Both developments were impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Both had difficult beginnings. One is unlikely to be missed – the other, though, might be looked back on more favorably.
Pirelli took over the Monza Rally Show at the weekend as it celebrated its tenure as the WRC's official tire supplier
“Even if the start has not really been easy due to the Covid times, for us it was quite difficult to develop in three months the product for the year after,” said Testoni. “But even that, with our technology, we found the product to start the season.
“When we decided to join WRC we put some targets. The goal arrived quite early; that’s why we decided to leave WRC.”
Turning Ogier from foe to friend probably wasn’t on that list of targets. But achieving it anyway suggests Pirelli delivered.
