It started with lunch, naturally. For those of us more used to a hasty meal deal eaten al desko, kicking off a factory tour with a three-course lunch of foie gras mousse, slow stewed beef casserole, and a lemon tart was quite the welcome. I was informed that the capacious cafeteria, set in the old factory building, was more for corporate entertainment rather than a true production line canteen, but it was hard to airbrush the image of sweat-streaked factory workers queuing up for a mille-fuille after several hours running a steam-driven vulcanisation press.
We’ve brought you several behind-the-scenes factory visits in recent years, including Miche wheels and the Colnago factory in Cambiago, but this is the first tyre brand we’ve lifted the lid on, so I’m going to play this with a relatively straight bat and go into the nuts and bolts of how a tyre is actually constructed. I was quite surprised to find it was in many ways more akin to clothing manufacture than the hardware we are more used to, but mixed in with a plethora of wonderfully vintage, often steamy machines and a laissez-faire attitude to machine guarding.
