Dallara: Engineering the Future of Motorsports

Dallara Group S.r.l. is the largest multi-national Italian race car manufacturer. Founded by its current President, Giampaolo Dallara. After working for Ferrari, Maserati, Lamborghini and De Tomaso, in 1972 in his native village of Varano de' Melegari (Parma), Dallara created Dallara Automobili, where he started building chassis for sports car racing and hillclimbing. Now, The Dallara Group currently employs more than 800 people, and is the sole manufacturer of racing cars for the IndyCar Series, Indy NXT, FIA Formula 2, FIA Formula 3 and Super Formula Championships.

Daniele Guarnaccia, Program Manager of the Dallara Stradale, explains the creation of Dallara's first road-legal vehicle, combining Formula car performance with road usability: “My team started designing the car mid-2015. If I want to summarize the car in three words, the three words are aerodynamics, weight, and lateral acceleration. 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.”

Andrea Pontremoli, CEO of Dallara, discusses Dallara’s commitment to sustainability in three areas: economic, social, and environmental; “Economic sustainability…we re-invest all of the earnings of the company. Social sustainability 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. Together we have designed nine master’s 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. And third is the sustainability for the environment. 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 behaviour. This is our job and this is our contribution to the sustainability of our world.

Creo is the 3D CAD solution that helps you accelerate product innovation to build better products faster. Our expert Brian Thompson gave us some further insight into why Creo is important to Dallara: “Dallara outsources their powertrains and builds a performance vehicle around the powertrain. 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. We're excited to have Dallara as part of this story because in fact, they do kind of what the inverse of a lot of automotive OEMs do. Most of our customers go as far as maybe a little bit of chassis design, but mostly just powertrain design with Creo 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.”