This weekend the WRC returns to the spotlight with the third to last round of the 2023 World Championship, as well as the last on dirt track: the Chile Rally. The rally returns to the calendar 4 years after the last edition contested and won in 2019 by Ott Tanak and Martin Jarveoja on Toyota Yaris WRC Plus.
The last event of the season on American soil will feature some pretty fast special stages. These, especially in the first part of the morning, could have a surface made humid by the local climate.
For the South American event, Pirelli, the WRC’s sole tire supplier, will bring its own dirt tyres, namely the Scorpion KX WRC. These will be available to riders in 2 main compounds.
Pirelli KX Scorpion SA: these are the Soft compounds, which in Chile will be considered ‘Prime’, i.e. the most suitable compound to tackle the entire route. It is no coincidence that drivers will be able to count on a greater number of these tires because they are ideal for racing on surfaces that require a lot of grip.
Pirelli KX Scorpion HA: these are the Hard compounds, which will be considered in this case as ‘Option’, therefore available to the pilots but in decidedly lower quantities than the Soft ones. These will be suitable for longer tests where the surface will be more treacherous.
Chile Rally: tire allocation
Considering Prime and Option, Pirelli will supply each car with 32 tires divided as follows:
24 Prime (Soft) erasers
8 Option tires (Hard)
Furthermore, drivers will be able to select 4 additional tires to use in the Shakedown. The choice of compound will be free, but it is likely that they will adopt the Soft tyres.
Rally of Chile: the comment by Terenzio Testoni
Terenzio Testoni, Pirelli rally activity manager, commented on the Chile Rally on the eve of the South American event: “Considering that the World Championship is still open, I expect a very hard-fought, spectacular and not easy rally from a technical point of view , like every race on the calendar.”
“The road surface of the Bio Bio region is the terrain of choice for our most used tires during the season, namely the soft compound Scorpion, which are able to guarantee grip in all conditions, as they have also demonstrated in the muddy opening stages of the last Greek Rally”.
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