One month after the Rally of Croatia, the WRC returns this weekend with the fourth round of the 2022 season: the Rally of Portugal. It will not be any event, because it will be the first of the season on clay and will still see Sébastien Loeb and Sébastien Ogier compete against each other. Against each other. But there will be even more, because Kalle Rovanpera will have to open all the tests on Friday as the leader of the World Championship and many will try to take advantage of it to reduce the distance from him.
The Rally of Portugal will also be important from the point of view of tires, because Pirelli will debut the new Soft and Hard compounds of the Scorpions, the tires made specifically for dirt roads and the hybrid Rally1 cars, which have replaced the WRC this year. Plus.
The new roofs will be called upon to resist the dirt and fast roads, but also the technical ones of Portugal. The pilots will face mixed surfaces, between sandy and soft earth, which gives little grip, up to more difficult and treacherous areas that also have several sharp rocks.
To make everything more complex there will be the weather, which could give rain and, therefore, different strategies from the point of view of the tires. Even the wet ones could thus have a very important role, not to mention the second day of competition, that of Friday, where the riders will have to do without the mid-day service, but only the Tire fitting zone to choose the compounds for the afternoon tour.
Scorpion KX WRC: this is the tire dedicated to hybrid Rally1 by Pirelli and is available in 2 compounds: Soft and Hard. Both have been updated for this season with reinforced structures from last season’s model and a design optimized for the extra weight and torque offered by hybrid cars.
As for the Rally of Portugal, Hard will be considered the main compound, able to offer resistance to the most abrasive surfaces. The Soft, on the other hand, will guarantee an important alternative for tests with less grip, a condition caused by low temperatures and humidity.
This is Terenzio Testoni, Pirelli’s rally activity manager
“As the first gravel rally of the season, Portugal will be a great test for the team and their new cars. It will also be the first opportunity to see how they perform on the prevailing surface in the World Championship,” said Terenzio Testoni, rally activity manager for Pirelli.
“For us it will be the first opportunity to use the new Hard and Soft compounds of our Scorpion KX WRC tires. These tires combine what we have learned during our first WRC return season, but have additional tricks to better suit the tires. requests for the new Rally1 cars “.
“The hard and rocky base of the stages in Portugal makes the hard compound the main choice, but we can also expect the soft compound to be particularly chosen for the first laps of the stages, especially in rainy weather. In Portugal we will find a ‘ wide range of weather conditions, but also surface conditions, so it should provide a good all-round test for our tires. “
The allocation of tires per driver
Pirelli will bring around 2,400 tires to Portugal, 520 of these for the top class of the WRC, Rally1. Each driver behind the wheel of a hybrid Rally1 car will be able to use a maximum of 28 tires during the rally, including Shakedown.
Each crew at the wheel of a hybrid Rally1 car will be able to choose the 28 tires for the race from the following compounds available:
24 Scorpion KX WRC HA (Hard)
8 Scorpion KX WRC SA (Soft)
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