Bridgestone partners with Lamborghini to develop bespoke Potenza Race tyre for Huracán STO supercar

Bridgestone has been selected as the exclusive tyre supplier for the new Lamborghini Huracán STO, the luxury Italian manufacturer’s road-homologated super sports car. In addition to custom-developed Bridgestone Potenza Sport tyres, the Lamborghini Huracán STO can now also be fitted with bespoke Bridgestone Potenza Race semi-slick tyres. These tailor-made Potenza Race tyres 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 tyres 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 tyre has been tailor-made for the first time for the Lamborghini Huracán STO.  As such, the tyre’s tread is lined with the colours of the Italian tricolore – a nod to the fact that both the tyre and vehicle have been designed in Italy – and features Lamborghini’s distinctive markings.

The bespoke Bridgestone Potenza Race tyre promises excellent dry grip, thanks to an optimised tread compound, pattern and sporty tyre profile, which increases grip and handling in dry conditions. The tyre also boasts long-lasting on-track performance and outstanding lap time ability – a result of maximised contact area and even pressure distribution, which enhances braking and cornering. And with a carcass design that enables high-performance on normal roads, the tyre is engineered for both the road and track.

Bridgestone Potenza Race’s development relied heavily on the company’s ground-breaking virtual tyre modelling and simulation technologies, which enable a digital twin of a tyre 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 maximise the tyre’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 tyre development period was reduced¹ while offering increased flexibility. The virtual environment enables many more variants of a given tyre to be tested, thanks to the extreme speed of modifying the digital twin of the tyre 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 tyre 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 tyres are required to be built and physical testing is reduced.²

Exclusive tyre supplier

Developed and manufactured in Europe, custom-engineered Bridgestone Potenza Race tyres are now available as an optional fitment on Lamborghini’s Huracán STO. Alternatively, the Lamborghini Huracán STO is also available with bespoke Bridgestone Potenza Sport tyres to maximise the supercar’s incredible performance on the road.

Commenting was Steven De Bock, VP Consumer Replacement and OE at Bridgestone EMIA: “It’s brilliant to collaborate once again with Lamborghini, especially as sole tyre supplier for the incredible Huracán STO. We already proudly launched our bespoke Potenza Sport tyres for the vehicle, and now we’re excited to provide Potenza Race specifically for track-goers and high-performance enthusiasts. Both tyres maximise the vehicle’s impressive capabilities in different ways; 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 tyres specifically for the Huracán STO: first Potenza Sport and now Potenza Race,” said Maurizio Reggiani, Chief Technical Officer of Automobili Lamborghini. “These two bespoke Bridgestone options synchronise perfectly with the Huracán STO’s innate dynamic capabilities, providing drivers with a tyre that responds perfectly in a variety of performance settings, and maximising our super sports car’s capabilities on both road and track.”