El Diablo Made Them Do It
EL DIABLO MADE THEM DO IT
IF THERE'S ONE MISCONCEP tiOn that most sportbikc riders embrace, it's that they need race tires. Hate to burst your but, ble, Valcntmo, but only the fastest Sunday-morning canyon racers on warm, sunny days can begin to generate the sort of heat that race tires need for peak performance. Better to choose street-biased tires aimed at real-world speeds and temperatures. Better yet if they’re also capable of the occasional track day.
As are the new Pirelli Diablo and Diablo Corsa. Product of Pirelli’s new Modular Integrated Robotized System (MIRS) technology, these radiais are manufactured using numerous small, crossways strips of tread rubber that easily wrap around the tire carcass, rather then one long, thick, circumferential strip that has to be coaxed into shape and spliced together at the ends. The tire profile was created using Pirelli’s Ideal Contour Shaping (ICS) technology, while the tread’s Functional Groove Design (FGD) lets the front and rear tires work together to disperse water. Underneath all of this is Pirelli’s familiar zero-degree steel-belted radial construction.
BFD you say? Well, technologically speaking, the Diablos’ strengths arc said to be absolute structural uniformity and no vibration due to tire imbalance. What we as riders will appreciate is quicker warm-up time, exceptional stability and superb grip without the usual attendant reduction in tire life.
Cycle World had two opportunities to sample the new Pirellis, first at a formal press introduction and then in conjunction with a Pacific Track Time event (www.pacifictracktime.com). We started out on the standard Diablos, which did indeed prove to warm up quickly and offer remarkable traction for a street tire. They were stable, too, in no way adversely affecting our Ducati 999’s handling characteristics, as some tires do. Only when the pace was upped to near-race speeds did traction diminish, resulting in the occasional rear-wheel slide or twowheeled drift. But even after this sort of abuse, the Diablos had plenty of life lcft-significantly more than would a race tire.
Next up were the Diablo Corsas, which arc meant to bridge the gap between the street-biased standard Diablos and the racingfocused Dragon Supercorsas. Built on the latter’s carcass, they offer increased traction over the former through the use of a grippier rubber compound and narrower tread grooves, though the pattern remains the same.
The simple act of changing from the standard Diablos to the Diablo Corsas knocked 2 seconds off the 999’s lap times at the Streets of Willow, largely due to the Corsas’ better ability to stick during trail-braking and rapid, side-to-side transitions. Again, even after numerous hard laps, there was plenty of tire life left.
The standard Diablos are available in a wide range of sizes with prices ranging from $150 to $260, while the Diablo Corsas come in the three most popular sportbikes sizes priced at $178, $218 and $253. Brian Catterson
