A special surprise
For Pirelli, Monza is a special Grand Prix.
Our headquarters is no more than 15 km from the Monza racetrack as the crow flies, which is why it is known as the home Grand Prix.
This year we wanted to make the Monza GP special, with a completely unexpected surprise for three fans of motor racing. Andrea, Giuseppe and Marco are big fans of F1®, have a common passion for motorsports and love sharing their point of view on races and drivers via their social media accounts or blog pages.
The idea was to share our passion for racing and our work, letting our guests experience all the things we do during competition weekends.
For Andrea and Giuseppe the weekend began on Friday afternoon when they had the chance to visit our Bicocca Experimentation Centre, where various tyre tests are carried out for both road driving and racing.
The visit then took them to the Pirelli Foundation, where documents, historical photographs and the whole archive of sketches and original designs which, over time, world famous artists and other creatives have made for Pirelli are collected. For these two racing fans we opened up an archive of images and photographs of more than 100 years of Pirelli's involvement in motorsport.
Saturday was the start of the real motoring weekend: the doors to the Paddock Club were opened, right above the pit lanes of the racetrack. A unique viewpoint for enjoying the qualification day of the Monza GP, which, for the record, saw Mercedes come out on top, followed in second place by Ferrari.To tell the truth it wasn't enough to see the pit lane from above: just after we took a look round everything during an exclusive pit walk, even going into the boxes of the teams.
After returning to the Paddock Club, our guests had the chance to meet some of the key players at Pirelli Motorsport: Mario Isola, racing manager, and Roberto Boccafogli, exchanging technical comments, questions and interesting facts.
Then the double cherry on the cake: a meeting first with Valtteri Bottas and then with Jenson Button.
But the emotions of Saturday didn't end there: at the end of the official qualification it was down to the Paddock, the inner sanctum for all fans of F1®. Our destination was the Fitting Area and the Pirelli Motorhome. Here our guests met the Director of Motorsport Paul Hembery, and were able to ask him all kinds of questions (some of them extremely technical) for more than 40 minutes.
For the race on Sunday the day was spent at Hospitality, the area that Pirelli sets up every year between the Paddocks and the Variante Ascari and which hosts clients, insiders, guests and employees, and this time our followers too. The day was filled with meetings with the stars of F1® - both drivers and technicians - and sessions on the driving simulator, before the real highlight: being able to follow the race itself from the Ascari stand.
At the end of the two days in the Monza Temple of Speed, another surprise was reserved for the most active of the three guests on social media: an F1® show-tyre personalised for the occasion by one of the "engravers" of Pirelli, one of the artisans who, still by hand and in person, aided by sophisticated, precise tools,make the test treads of the tyres, and who on Sunday wrote in the name of the winner, below a profile of the Monza circuit.
The involvement of the followers of the world of Pirelli doesn't end with the recently completed Monza Grand Prix. Pirelli is involved in a huge amount of events and it's worth experiencing them together. Be a keen reader of our stories and follow us closely through social media to discover how to be part of our world.
