The aim of this study is to develop a procedure to determine the tangential true stress-strain behavior of pipes. A modified ring test setup is proposed consisting of a ring specimen loaded with two separate D-blocks. By means of a finite element model, a optimized ring specimen geometry is obtained. The optimized ring specimen exhibits uniform tangential distribution in the gauge region of the specimen and necking occurs consistently at the center of the gauge length. It is found that friction has a substantial effect on the mechanical response of the ring test. Assisted by the FE model, the friction during the experiment is account for and a data analysis procedure to determine the tangential stress-strain curve of the pipe is proposed. It is found that the results using this procedure show very good agreement with previously published results.