for a blast at the weekend without the need to worry if it rains. My main takeaways from the road session were the feeling of security, and even trying to wheelie out of corners before the bike was upright didn’ t trouble the tyre, it just dug in and put the power down without a hint of slip. The other characteristic of the tyres was a single lean rate from upright to cranked over; no sudden drops as the tyre changes profile. This is something that gives confidence in a tyre’ s grip – there’ s nothing worse than a tyre feeling like it’ s sliding out as it drops onto a steeper part of the profile. As for longevity, as mentioned earlier, the centre section of the tyre has a 75 % silica blend for cold / wet grip and 25 % carbon black to help it deal with the stress of acceleration and still provide a decent mileage, which Pirelli claims is 15 % above the outgoing Rosso Corsa.
ON THE TRACK
Billed as tyres aimed at 50 % road and 50 % track use, I was certainly keen to try the tyres at Kyalami, which is a fast track with some high lean, high throttle corners – the kind that start a tyre sliding when you’ re really trying to push on. Pirelli clearly has no problems with the new tyres’ track potential; the lineup of bikes to test the new tyres included the Ducati Panigale V4S, MV Agusta F4, BMW S1000RR, Yamaha YZF-R1 as well as the S1000R, Tuono 1100 and Super Duke 1200 super-nakeds. My first session was on the BMW S1000RR, which is the perfect superbike for learning a track. It’ s an easy-going, rider-friendly machine that makes going very fast exceptionally easy. During the warm-up lap the tyres showed to be really consistent during turn-in – there are no changes in effort needed to lean the bike and there’ s no disconcerting‘ drop’ halfway through the lean of the bike. Only a lap later, barrelling into the sharp lefthander at the end of the sixth gear, 275km / h straight and slamming on the anchors into the second gear left, the front is super stable and offers huge amounts of grip. It was clearly well up to temperature. Despite there being a transition between the two compounds, I couldn’ t notice a difference or point at
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