Dallara: Engineering the future of motorsports

“The Dallara Stradale is the last of its kind”

In this episode of the Third Angle, we head to Italy’s Motor Valley to explore the engineering prowess of Dallara, the legendary manufacturer behind some of the most advanced racing cars in the world. Our host Paul Haimes, meets with Andrea Pontremoli, CEO of Dallara, and two members of his team - Luca Pignacca and Daniele Guarnaccia to reveal the story behind the Dallara Stradale, a car that takes Formula car technology to the next level.

The Stradale is no ordinary car - built with a fiber carbon monocoque chassis it’s designed for maximum strength and minimal weight, meaning it has unparalleled agility on both the track and the road.

Find out more about Dallara here.

Find out more about Windchill here and CREO here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC. 

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and X for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jacqui Cook. Sound design and editing by Rema Mukena. Location recording by Mark Dezzani. And music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where motorsport expertise meets automotive innovation.

I'm your host, Paul Hames from industrial software company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world. Each powered by PTC technology.

Today, we're heading to the heart of Italy's Motor Valley to visit Dallara, the legendary manufacturer known for its dominant force in Formula Three, Formula Two, and IndyCar. I went to meet Andrea Pontremoli, CEO of Dallara, as well as two key members of his team, Luca Pignacca and Daniele Garnacchia, who will show us the production processes behind their standout creation, the Dallara Stradale.

Now this just isn't any car. It's a road legal vehicle with the DNA of a Formula car, where every element from its carbon fibre monocoque to its precise aerodynamics is designed for ultimate performance.

So here we are in the stunning surroundings of Verano de Melligardi, northern Italy at Dallara's HQ. It is probably the global leader in the design and manufacture of race cars, and a company I have a huge history with, having driven many of their Formula 3 cars in my exploits outside of PTC at the weekends.

Dallara's CEO, Andrea Pontremoli. Has very kindly agreed to show us around. So let's go and meet him. Thank you so much for meeting with us today.  it's a real pleasure. 

It's a pleasure for me. I had always this passion of race cars,  speed,  all these things. And Gianpaolo Dallara offered me the possibility to, to change my life.

Really. First, to come back to my own, my rules, let me say, we are very humble and we try to help to build up things.  the best performance that we can, but,  leaving the, the responsibility and leaving also the success to our customers. And, in fact, our company is based on trust. Three main values, the first one is humbleness, the second one is loyalty, and the third one is curiosity.

So, these are the three things that are the base of the company. And when I joined the company, 17 years ago, do you know how many cars we had here? Zero. So I bought all the cars that we have here, going around to try to find out the history and where they were. Yes. And it was really a very nice job for me to, to be able to find out these cars and to have pieces of our history.

I think that always. Working to try to improve, reduce cost, improve performance, reduce cost, improve performance, and have,  very satisfied customers. The second thing is,   the fact that when you are successful and you are a family owned company with a name, is the succession plan that is very important.

It's always a pleasure to have here someone visiting us. I'm Daniele, Program Manager of the Dallara Stradale. 

So Daniele, if we could just take a look down the line and actually just talk through what I'm seeing here and, you know, some of the cars that are actually on the line with us. 

This is the Dallara Stradale.

This is our first road legal car with the Dallara brand on it. My team,  we started designing the car mid,  2015 with a promise to Mr. Dallara to show him for his 80th birthday the first prototype on the ground. And the birthday was,   November 2016. So we had only,  15 months, 16 months. But the point that we started from zero.

Yes. 

The white paper at all to deliver him the first prototype. And we did it.  so after this big gift, we decided to replicate the gift for the next,   birthday. And we decided to promise him that the same day, the year after we have also the opening of the building. So with my team, we designed the building, the process, the supply chain, everything that can support the production of the car.

Yeah. In general, the,  the philosophy is to be,   to create the leanest,  assembly line possible. Okay.  so you are now in the pre check before the final delivery where the quality guys check everything under these big lights To see if everything is perfect If the cleaning is perfect if there are no defects of any of any sort And this is a very important phase because our customers expect the car is perfect For example in front of you you see the fourth station where we do the setup of the car And you will find no other automotive companies doing the setup like a Formula 3 car, like a Formula cars.

We have balance and for the aerodynamics, you need to control precisely the body. When we do the bodywork, the finishing or the last moment. And every car, 100 percent of the car are shakedown. Means that we do a check on the road, but this is also something special and peculiar. Other than road, we do also 100 percent check on track.

So every car is verified on track for the balance for the performance and then the final check you saw before and The engine is the right decision for this car We want to have the downforce at a certain level where we need a big diffuser at the rear We need an engine that is compact small and light to package the aero layout This is exactly at that time when we decided for the engine Exactly the right dimension the right weight and finally also the right power if you compare to the weight Do you want to have a drive?

Yes, of course. Absolutely. Of course. That's very 

generous. Thank you. Okay. So, we are here. So, So, one push to switch on the dash, on start. Then, Clutch and break together fully press altogether, and then long press until the engine is on. Okay. Look at that. I will select immediately,  the full power configuration because for this test drive, I definitely prefer to give you the maximum power.

And then we are applied to rise up the car because in this moment,  the car was already set to be on track. Okay, so it is in the lowest position. Yeah. So I will move it to the road one because we are going, having. Drive on the open road here in Varano. I think we're about ready to go. Yeah, let's go

Today it's a rainy day. But anyway, you have APS always on Okay, and also the ESP the full ESP control system. So tractions and your controls and you have all the electronics to 

keep you safe 

Indicators like motorbike one push on one push off. Okay, perfect That's good, everything is designed to reduce weight.

Yes The car is not harsh at all. Front axle and rear axle always in synchro, there are no strange movements. And we are very proud of the steering wheel feeling, because you will not feel any kickback. 

Yeah. I mean, my first reaction is, this feels like a racing car. It's absolutely beautiful. To me, this is 

the last of its kind.

A little bit of turbo at the back. Have

Just here on the right, yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's perfect. And this one? Here we are, yes. Daniele, that was amazing. Here we are. If I want to summarize the car in three words, the three words are aerodynamics, weight, and lateral acceleration.  so it is not an engine centric car, but for some perspective that will tell you why.

First of all, we thought about the performance of aerodynamics. Because if you have a light car with aerodynamics, the experience of driving the car is like a formula car. So every sports car that is in the market is more similar to Gran Turismo, to GT cars. In this case, our DNA is formula cars. Even if we are working for every series in the, in the world, in the motorsport, the dream of us was to allow the experience of a formula car.

So light aerodynamics, and we started then and then to do, to be light. We massively used our. Core technology, the use of carbon fiber, and,  it's a mix of,  carbon technologies because we're using prepreg like Formula One, so the monocoque is precisely done as a Formula One monocoque, but with a mix of automotive technologies because we also provide a lot of engineering service to big automotive industries, big OEM, so we try to synthesize all our experience also in terms of,  of carbon fibers.

The aerodynamics layout is like a mix between a Formula car and a Le Mans car. We have a front diffuser. We have big channel duct on the, on the side of the body like a laka,  the driver as well. The ergonomic of the position of the driver by definitions because of the big diffuser in the front is like a formula car.

You have the, your feet that are higher than your, than your back,  is acceler as a formula car, and the results, if the car weigh only 850 kilograms. We have aerodynamics downforce at top speed. It is almost the same with the weight that you can consider that you are close to one to one downforce to weight.

There's something incredible. And you combine with the specific tires, with the vehicle dynamics that it's like a Formula car, you can reach with road tires, 2G of lateral acceleration. It's something that still now, after 70 years, no other cars can do this. One of the key points of the car is the configurations.

The car. In reality, there are three cars in one because you can, you can configure the car as a barchetta that's completely open, but it is not a different car, respect the full, the full coupe, so the completely closed because the, the canopy, as we call it, is a,  canopy, a rigid canopy that can close completely the barchetta.

And it is a, also an equipment that you can buy in after sale. So your barchetta can be transformed in the full coupe. But with all the configurations in the middle, so you can create the target using only the windscreen. You can create the spider using the windscreen and a T top. And the doors, for example, can be removable in five minutes by the final user.

Let me say sustainability is really three things. Economic sustainability, because we have to be sustainable, so we have to make profit. As a company, We reinvest all the earnings of the company are reinvested in the company. So sustainability about the economic point of view. The second thing is the social sustainability and is what I said before about the academy.

So social means that we try to design the society that we would like to have in the future. Now our job is to prepare the next 50 years. The best way to understand how can be the future is to try to design it. Together we have designed nine master degrees in engineering for the future engineers. And then we put together also the four universities that we have here in Emilia Romagna, that in total we are talking about 250 students, 50, 000 students, and 6, 000 professors.

So it's a big bunch of professors that we can select the best to teach in our courses. We try to build up this kind of society. And third is the sustainability for the environment. And so here we go back to electric, not electric, hydrogen, and so on. As Dallara, we don't build up powertrains. So, it's not our job.

For us, it's a black box. You can give me an electrical engine, a combustion engine, a hydrogen engine, whatever. My job is to use in the most efficient way this energy through the lightweight, through the aerodynamics and through the vehicle dynamics behavior. So this is our job and this is our contribution to the sustainability of our world.

That was Andrea Pontremoli and his team from Dallara giving us an inside look at how they've managed to bring Formula car technology to the road with the Stradale. Now it's time to meet our expert, Brian Thompson from PTC, who will walk us through the digital tools and processes that help make Dallara's engineering vision a reality.

Brian, Dallara have used PTC's CAD software since 1994, starting with ProEngineer and now with Creo. Can you give me further insight as to why Creo is important to Dallara and the automotive sector as a whole? 

Yeah, I would love to. First of all, very exciting to be talking about Dallara. I'll start by saying that Creo, Has a tremendous presence in automotive powertrain design worldwide.

 there are a lot of automotive powertrains designed in CREO and you might say that's the reason why it's exciting to talk about Dallara here. And actually the opposite is true.  I think the audience. Might already know that Dallara outsources their powertrains and builds a performance vehicle around the powertrain.

And so, interestingly, Dallara is doing everything connecting the powertrain to the road, if you will. And their expertise in engineering is in delivering a high performance vehicle,  around the powertrain that they outsource. And, and by the way, it's very likely that powertrain was in fact designed in Creo.

But it's exciting to see such incredible performance. From vehicles from Dallara now being applied to roadworthy or like everyday use type of vehicles because It sure does seem from what we've learned from this latest design that they haven't sacrificed a bit in terms of engineering and performance.

And so what Creo helps them do is it helps them precisely engineer the performance that they want out of the vehicle, connecting that sophisticated powertrain to road performance. In a very, very exciting ways. And so we're excited to have Dallara as, as, as part of this story,  because in fact, they do kind of what the inverse of a lot of automotive OEMs do.

They're designing a,  roadworthy vehicle around an existing powertrain. And most of our, most of our. Customers go as far as maybe a little bit of chassis design, but mostly just powertrain design with Creo and then, and then use other design tools for say the body of the vehicle. And it's great to see Dallara doing the opposite.

It's a fantastic, fantastic story. And we love to see the type of engineering and, and broad and deep use of Creo to get there. 

Thanks to Andrea, Luca and Daniele for taking us behind the scenes at Dallara. And to our expert Brian from PTC for explaining how digital innovation supports their cutting edge work.

And also special thanks to our producer, Mark Disani, for organizing this episode. Please rate, review, and subscribe to our bi weekly Third Angle episodes wherever you listen to your podcasts and follow PTC on LinkedIn and X for future episodes. Companies that make product the world relies on, rely on PTC.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive producer is Jackie Cook. Sound design and editing by Rema Mukenna. Location recording by Mark Disani. And music by Rowan Bishop.