Why Pirelli Was the Official Tyre Partner of the Australian Open
Is Pirelli actually making today’s tennis balls?
Thank you for being here. You are receiving this email because you subscribed to Idée Fixe, the newsletter for curious minds. I’m Toni Cowan-Brown, a tech and F1 commentator. I’ve spent the past five years on the floor of way too many F1, FE, and WEC team garages, learning about the business, politics, and tech of motorsports. I hope you’ll stick around.
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Why talk about Pirelli and tennis balls, you ask? Well, for starters, it’s Wimbledon - that tie is pretty straightforward. I have also now watched the F1 Movie twice, and for some reason, the tennis balls that Sonny Haynes (played by Brad Pitt) can’t seem to let go of have been living rent free in my mind.
After motorsports, football, sailing, and skiing, Pirelli (re)enters the world of tennis, supporting the Australian Grand Slam earlier this year and leveraging this high-profile showcase to promote its brand worldwide.
This isn’t a random category clash; it’s rubber mastery meeting a top-five global sporting stage. By reviving its own tennis heritage and fusing it with modern experiential tech, Pirelli demonstrates that a sponsorship works best when the product’s core material (literally) overlaps with the sport’s playbook. In the same way, it absolutely makes sense that Pirelli organises the Hot Laps in Formula 1.
A quick pit-stop in Melbourne
Pirelli slipped beyond pit-lane and onto Rod Laver Arena, signing a multi-year deal as the Australian Open’s first “Official Tyre Partner.” This year, the AO fan-zone gamified “grip and rebound” - Pirelli’s comfort zone. This recent push to enhance fan experiences (food festivals, courtside bars) is designed to keep that crowd engaged.
That activation drew some of the event’s highest dwell times, according to Tennis Australia recaps. The package gives the Italian brand virtual court signage, premium hospitality, a custom fan-zone and a flood of social content that beamed to more than 1 billion cumulative broadcast minutes worldwide. So why invest in tennis, and why now?
Italian tennis is hot. Jannik Sinner’s 2024 AO title doubled Italian viewership YOY, putting Italy into the event’s top-five TV markets- an irresistible stage for an Italian icon.
Brand growth down under. Australia boasts one of the world’s highest densities of prestige-car ownership. Pirelli’s flagship P Zero World store opened in Melbourne in 2019; a Grand-Slam megaphone is perfect chemistry.
Rubber = performance storytelling. A tyre company sponsoring a non-motorsport still gets to talk about grip, rebound, and precision which is exactly all the ingredients a tennis ball needs.
Tennis - especially the four Grand Slams - is increasingly a stage for luxury brands to flex prestige positioning. Just like what we are seeing in Formula 1. As the FT notes, sport is undergoing a “luxurification” wave, with events named after or partnered with high-end labels to reinforce exclusivity and attract affluent audiences. Pirelli’s move sits squarely in this trend: by slapping its logo courtside at Melbourne Park, it signals “premium performance” not just on asphalt but on clay and hard courts too
Pirelli’s forgotten tennis roots (1930-1970)
Long before F1 slicks, Pirelli produced “Super Extra” tennis balls authorised by the Italian Tennis Federation and were used in Davis-Cup ties. Production was consolidated in Seregno, where they even experimented with bright yellow and orange balls decades before the ITF standardised optic-yellow we have come to be accustomed to today. Vintage ads (as seen below) from the era helped cement tennis in Italian popular culture.
How a tennis ball is built, and why tyres make sense
Rubber core: Two half-shells of vulcanised natural rubber are compression-moulded, then fused under ~18 psi of internal pressure - eerily similar to curing a tyre’s inner liner.
Bounce control: Like a P Zero compound, the core’s recipe (rubber, clay, sulphur, accelerators) balances elasticity with durability so rebound stays in the ITF’s 53-58 in range.
Felt wrap: “Dog-bone” wool-nylon panels are glued, cured, then steamed to fluff -analogue to a tread siping that opens under stress for extra grip.
As someone who knows almost nothing about tennis, I did have one big question on my mind - Is Pirelli actually making today’s tennis balls?
The short answer is historical yes, but modern no. Today’s balls contain no Pirelli DNA; the relationship is strictly a marketing partnership built on shared rubber physics and brand storytelling.
According to Pirelli’s official press page, they manufactured “Super Extra” and “Torneo” balls from the 1930s until the 1970s; they were Davis-Cup approved and even came in early optic-yellow variants.
After divesting that line in the ’70s, Pirelli exited ball production altogether. The current ITF-approved balls you see at Slams are made by Dunlop (AO), Wilson (US Open), Head/Penn, Slazenger, etc. No supplier lists or patents since 1980 link Pirelli to modern cores or felt. In addition, there’s zero evidence it sells compounds to any tennis-ball OEM. Modern ball factories in Thailand, China and the Philippines source rubber from commodity suppliers, not speciality tyre makers.
Tennis Australia has flagged ball-recycling pilots for 2026. If Pirelli wants a sustainability angle, donating rubber-recycling tech (something it already deploys for end-of-life tyres) is a logical - but still very hypothetical - next step.
This isn’t about making tennis balls, rather it’s about planting Pirelli’s rubber-science flag in another luxury-sports sandbox where demographics, digital content potential, and cost-efficient, single-event activation make for a compelling marketing ROI experiment. Expect the brand to double down if AO metrics hit, then spin the story toward European warm-up events or sustainability collaborations.
And unlike F1, which demands global sole-supply commitments, tennis allows Pirelli to test the waters on a single marquee event, dialling budget to trial activation gamification without a multi-series obligation.
When you view a tennis ball as a miniature, pressurised rubber performance product, Pirelli’s storytelling writes itself, or so I think. I’m still sitting here wondering if there is a broader play here in the making or if, truly, Pirelli is using tennis as a marketing canvas - and there is nothing more to it.
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