Pony cars and exotics usually don’t have much in common. Both prioritize driving pleasure, of course, but their missions emerge in different ways: front-engine versus mid-engine, steel and aluminum versus carbon fiber, sensible financing versus candy-robbery, etc. But at the 2023 Goodwood Festival Of Speed, we learned that the 2024 Ford Mustang and Pagani Utopia share one essential element for high performance – Pirelli P Zero Trofeo RS tires.
Making its debut at the event in West Sussex, England, the P Zero Trofeo RS is Pirelli’s newest flagship tire, building on the Trofeo R already found in hypercars such as the McLaren 765LT. Although Pirelli will continue to offer the R alongside the RS, the latter benefits from recent advances in digital modeling, which allow tire manufacturers to experiment with virtually different contact patches, tread patterns and compound mixes to give the tire maximum performance. Pirelli says the RS offers improved cornering response and stability thanks to those advancements.
Like the Trofeo R, the RS is a semi-slick, track-ready tire, although it’s road-legal. As such, it’s not ideal for persistently wet conditions, and the tires will lose traction as the ambient temperature approaches freezing even if the road is dry. But the P Zero Trofeo RS will likely be worth such a concession to those who bring Utopia and the Dark Horse to the track.
Oddly enough, the Mustang Dark Horse will only offer the Trofeo RS as an option in North America. Ford Performance Motorsport Global Director Mark Rush said that the European market will only accept the Dark Horse equipped with regular P Zero tires. And in another plot twist, Ford is hiding Pirelli’s newest hot and heavy rubber in plain sight – although Pirelli didn’t officially announce the Trofeo RS until last week, images of the Mustang Dark Horse’s debut betrayed the new tires since last. September. Pagani Utopia’s official debut shows it wearing P Zero Corsas, so tick the Ford column for being so sneaky.
