Bridgestone has been selected as the exclusive tire supplier for the new Lamborghini Huracán STO, the luxury Italian manufacturer’s road-homologated super sports car. In addition to custom designed Bridgestone Potenza Sport tires, the Lamborghini Huracán STO can now also be fitted with custom Bridgestone Potenza Race semi-slick tires. These tailor-made Potenza Race tires offer excellent dry grip for outstanding lap times and reliable cornering, braking and handling on and off the track.
True high-performance
Custom-developed Bridgestone Potenza Race tires have been designed to enhance the incredible capabilities of the Lamborghini Huracán STO and let drivers experience true high-performance. Building on Bridgestone’s long heritage in Formula One racing and high-performance vehicles, the premium Potenza Race semi-slick tire has been customized for the first time for the Lamborghini Huracán STO. As such, the tire’s tread is lined with the colors of Italy’s il Tricolore – a nod to the fact that both the tire and vehicle have been designed in Italy – and features Lamborghini’s distinctive markings.
The custom Bridgestone Potenza Race tire promises excellent dry grip, thanks to an optimized tread compound, pattern, and sporty tire profile, which increases grip and handling in dry conditions. The tire also boasts long-lasting on-track performance and outstanding lap time ability – a result of maximized contact area and even pressure distribution, which enhances braking and cornering. And with a carcass design that enables high-performance on normal roads, the tire is engineered for both the road and track.
Development of the Bridgestone Potenza Race tire relied heavily on the company’s ground-breaking virtual tire modeling and simulation technologies, which enable a digital twin of a tire to be developed and tested. In this project, virtual design and simulation enabled Bridgestone and Lamborghini to find the Huracán STO’s optimal match to maximize the tire’s contact area and distribute pressure evenly under the most severe cornering, braking and traction conditions.
The use of this technology ensured that the Huracán STO’s tire development period was reduced1 while offering increased flexibility. The virtual environment enables many more variants of a given tire to be tested, thanks to the extreme speed of modifying the digital twin of the tire and immediately submitting it to a subjective test on the driving simulator, to ultimately cut the vehicle’s time to market. The use of virtual technologies also ensures that the chosen tire is the ideal fitment, as many alternatives have been assessed during development, and it helps to deliver various environmental benefits: both natural resource use and exhaust emissions are cut as fewer prototype tires are required to be built and physical testing is reduced.2
Exclusive tire supplier
Developed and manufactured in Europe, custom-engineered Bridgestone Potenza Race tires are now available as an optional fitment on Lamborghini’s Huracán STO. Alternatively, the Lamborghini Huracán STO is also available with custom Bridgestone Potenza Sport tires to maximize the supercar’s incredible performance on the road.
“It’s brilliant to collaborate once again with Lamborghini, especially as sole tire supplier for the incredible Huracán STO,” said Steven De Bock, vice president, consumer replacement and original equipment at Bridgestone EMIA. “We already proudly launched our custom Potenza Sport tires for the vehicle, and now we’re excited to provide Potenza Race tires specifically for track-goers and high-performance enthusiasts. Both tires maximize the vehicle’s impressive capabilities in different ways and I’m proud to speak for a team who are able to provide this level of detail and coverage to Lamborghini customers.”
“We are pleased to have selected Bridgestone again to develop two tires specifically for the Huracán STO: first Potenza Sport and now Potenza Race,” said Maurizio Reggiani, chief technical officer of Automobili Lamborghini. “These two custom Bridgestone options synchronize perfectly with the Huracán STO’s innate dynamic capabilities, providing drivers with a tire that responds effortlessly in a variety of performance settings, and maximizing our super sports car’s capabilities on both road and track.”
*1 Bridgestone’s virtual tire development can cut product development time and outdoor and fleet tire tests by up to 50 percent.
*2 Around 200 tires are saved for every single project Bridgestone’s virtual tire development is used in, leading to a savings of around 60 percent on raw materials and CO2 emissions during the tire development phase.
