Stranger in a Strange Land

I.DE.A and Ferrari collaborated on this composite-bodied Mondial—which, for four seasons, served as a CART pace car.

Story by David Rodriguez Sanchez

    

September 4, 2025

Although it entered the Indianapolis 500 a few times in the 1950s, Ferrari has never competed full-time in America’s IndyCar series. But in the late 1980s and early ’90s, a one-off Ferrari Mondial served as a pace car for CART. How did that happen?

The story starts with Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, better known as PPG, which was founded in 1883. The company ventured into car racing in 1975, when its Automotive Finishes Group, which would supply coatings for Ferrari in the 1980s, began supplying urethane-based paint for cars entered in the Indianapolis 500.

Then, in the late ’70s, IndyCar team owner Roger Penske approached Fred Rhue, vice president of Automotive and Industrial Products at PPG, to ask for sponsorship for the fledgling CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams) organization, a group of team owners and drivers dissatisfied with Indy organizer USAC. Rhue agreed to Penske’s proposal, so in 1980 PPG sponsored the inaugural CART Indy Car World Series, which included every IndyCar-type race in the continent—except for the Indianapolis 500, which was still sanctioned by USAC.

In addition to title sponsorship, PPG had a vision to strengthen its relationship with automakers by creating special pace cars for the series. As described in 1988 by Automobile Quarterly, “By 1984, PPG was fielding similarly painted pace cars representing the four U.S. automakers, all of them modified by Detroit-area performance specialists. Each year the cars became more sophisticated and, as they did, PPG encouraged the manufacturers themselves to contribute to their styling and technological development. This in turn freed PPG to invest more money and effort in color and graphics.”

In this way, many one-off vehicles were created yearly for use as CART pace cars. And this is where our featured Ferrari comes in.

DURING THE 1980s, almost all of the pace cars came from American automakers, although several Japanese and European manufacturers would arrive in the ’90s. In 1987, there were as many as 12 different pace cars spotted throughout the year, and the addition of a Ferrari—one not even designed by Pininfarina—was truly a surprise.

Presented first as a full-size styling model at CART’s Laguna Seca race on October 9, 1987, the PPG Ferrari I.DE.A was big news everywhere, particularly in Formula 1-obsessed Italy. The unforgettable reporter Giancarlo Perini in Turin attributed the Ferrari pace car to PPG Industries Italia’s enthusiastic CEO Renzo Gay, who lobbied Ferrari (not Enzo so much as the company’s managers from Fiat) for its approval and support. He succeeded in this task by the autumn of 1986.

It was a particularly busy year for I.DE.A, the Institute of Development in Automotive Engineering, a Turinese design and engineering outfit with strong links to Fiat since its inception in 1978. Managed by the extraordinary Franco Mantegazza and based in the chic-romantic Villa Cantamerla on a hill overlooking Turin, I.DE.A was already working hard for the Fiat Group on its Tipo 2-Tipo 3 project, which yielded the Fiat Tipo-Tempra, Lancia Dedra, and Alfa 155, at the time the PPG project knocked on its door. In addition, the designers were working on the Lancia Thema 8.32, a prestigious version of the Thema sedan powered by a 3-liter Ferrari V8, a car strongly desired by charismatic Fiat and Ferrari chairman Vittorio Ghidella. [We featured a Thema 8.32 in issue #223’s “Fantastic Voyage.”—Ed.]

Ferrari engineer Roberto Babiero was entrusted with the project’s leadership. Rather than starting from scratch, a complete, regular-production Mondial chassis was delivered to I.DE.A by the end of the year. S/n 76390’s wheelbase was stretched 50 mm (about two inches), with both its front and rear bulkheads and substructures modified for the purpose. At I.DE.A, a team of designers under Ercole Spada and his deputy Justyn Norek started working on styling proposals, with the model shop of Silvano Botta and the body engineering squad of Marco Fantini waiting for their turns to take over.

Meanwhile, in Maranello, Ferrari was refining a number of experimental components to test on the car, most notably the 300-hp Motronic 3.4-liter Tipo F119D V8 engine of the upcoming 348 tb. Also included was a new electronically adjustable self-balancing suspension, which would also be installed on the 408 4RM prototype created by URSA (the Ufficio Ricerche Studi Avanzati, or Office of Advanced Studies and Research), run by Mauro Forghieri, which would later become known as Ferrari Engineering.

CART sent a long list of technical requirements for the new pace car. These included specific floor tie-down points to facilitate transport by truck; an engine that would start, either cold or hot, in no more than five seconds; and the ability to idle indefinitely, stationary in ambient temperatures of 100°F, without overheating.

In addition, the Ferrari’s electrical systems had to be pre-activated before the engine could be started, managed by two separate switches, and those systems had to automatically disconnect during an accident. Two high-capacity batteries were added to power a series of flashing lights that replaced the standard lighting system. A water tank was added to help cool the ABS-assisted brakes with a kind of forced shower, operated via a series of nozzles, whenever the driver braked at speeds above 35 mph.

ERCOLE SPADA’S PROPOSED DESIGN—characterized by its overly large glass surfaces, which emphasized PPG’s products’ applications, and Ferrari-inspired front oval grille, NACA duct, and wraparound strakes—was selected over the designs from Carlos Sánchez (illustrated here by the author) and Justyn Norek (which was characterized by a triple curve in its windscreen profile). The resulting full-scale styling model was completed by April 1987. This non-working model would do all the promotional work for the real car, including a hi-fi audio system spot by Pioneer, filmed around Fiorano and Maranello for Japanese TV.

By June, the model had also served as the pattern for the creation of epowood casts, on which the real car’s carbon-fiber trunk and rear decklid, door panels, roof, rear bumper, and more would be laid up. Using carbon fiber on car bodies outside of Formula 1 was very unusual at the time, and I.DE.A manufactured these carbon fiber-Kevlar composite components in-house, without relying on an autoclave.

The body and chassis were mated in September, after which the pace car was readied for shipment to Maranello. There, it would receive its mechanical heart, a five-speed transverse ZF gearbox, the new advanced suspension, an integral roll bar, four-point seat belts, Pirelli safety fuel tank, and many specific sub-systems.

Inside the pace car, former Renault interior designer François Lampreia created an avant-garde dashboard in Kevlar, which was wrapped in black suede and leather by the nearby Salt-Gavina company. The dash featured stacked instrumentation, the suspension controls, an inertial battery switch, switches for the front and rear flashing lights, a radio-telephone, and nozzles of the automatic fire extinguishing system. I.DE.A’s Pablo Hohenlohe designed the car’s very characteristic steering wheel, inspired by Ferrari’s traditional five-spoke wheels, as well as the striped element that wrapped around the bottom of the exterior.

“The bodywork as a whole features some noteworthy features,” reported Italian monthly AutoCapital. “The light from the frontal strobe headlamps is visible even with their lids lowered; the large rear window includes three rotating flaps that open automatically when the temperature in the engine compartment exceeds certain values.”

“We developed three different styling themes that were presented to the customer through a number of 1:5 scale drawings,” Ercole Spada told me this May, just a few months before his death in early August. “My take on the matter was chosen, then we proceeded with the creation of a proper, 1:1 interior-exterior styling model that was finished with every detail, except for the undetailed interior. The most visible element of it was the bundle of lines at the lower part of the bodywork, figured out to hook up to the Ferrari icon of the time, which was the Testarossa, as well as to lighten the ‘visual mass’ of the original Mondial. The Mondial we took as the starting point was a model that Commendatore Enzo Ferrari did not like at all, and it sold poorly, too.”

The PPG pace car was also Spada’s way of proposing a radically new look for the Mondial. Longer, wider, taller, and roomier than the production model, the pace car still looked neat and compact, almost tiny from the outside.

“Another characteristic element of our PPG Ferrari was the front oval-shaped radiator air intake,” Spada continued. “Of course, several projects were being carried out at the same time within I.DE.A; all were scheduled to be finished on the agreed dates. On the PPG we did not spend a day less than necessary to make a perfect job, as was our norm.

I personally followed all the phases of the work with the utmost care and attention. I never had the chance to drive it, but at least I was with it at its Laguna Seca presentation in static form. Since then, I have only seen the static model again at the entry hall of the IVI-PPG factory in Quattordio. I still like it so much that, honestly, I would not change a thing about the design today.”

By late June 1988, after some shakedown and promotional drives, the Ferrari pace car was delivered to PPG in the United States.

ALL OF CART’S PACE CARS WERE MAINTAINED by a team of mechanics led by Bart Coxon. This group had vetted each automaker’s proposal for safety, reliability, and performance, with everything non-standard or newly crafted (e.g., suspension, tires, electrical parts) having to meet their approval. Every pace car had to be able to take road-course turns safely at 65-70 mph, reach a top speed of 130-140 mph, and brake hard when diving into the pits at 120 mph. Most took from 12 to 16 months to build.

“With these pace cars, we had a program that provided opportunities for automobile companies to build the cars their engineering and design people really wanted to build, instead of what the manufacturing organization considered to be feasible to build at production volumes,” said Coxon.

After the starter’s call—“Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines!”—every CART race began with three paced laps. For the first two, as many as eight pace cars ran in front of the race cars. At the end of the second lap, all but one pace car abandoned the track; the remaining car was the officially designated pace car for that race, and led the pack for the final pre-race lap.

Ercole Spada (on left) and Franco Mantegazza with the full-size styling model.

This pace car was not driven by a member of the PPG team, but by a veteran racer such as Al Unser, Tom Sneva, or Gordon Johncock. Adding to the show, notable female drivers—including Sandra Bartley, Trisha Hessinger, Debbie Mayer, Margie Smith-Haas, Alice Ridpath, Janey Smith and Jodi Dangel—took the wheels of the PPG fleet at every track. The pace car team also performed a precision driving exhibition before each race.

“Traveling between races usually caused more wear and tear on the pace cars than running away from CART racers at 120 mph,” Coxon noted. He also admitted that, even among this fleet of mostly one-offs, the Ferrari Mondial was by far the most unreliable.

The I.DE.A Ferrari remained in the fleet of active PPG pace cars for at least four seasons—1988, 1989, 1990 and 1991—most often, according to all the photos I’ve found, with a female driver at the controls. Its presence on the track in subsequent seasons is unknown.

Though PPG remains a major sponsor of both NASCAR and IndyCar, the golden age of one-off pace car prototypes is now a memory. The cars themselves mostly returned to their makers’ museums, and indeed the I.DE.A Ferrari was displayed in the Galleria Ferrari in Maranello in 2013. Otherwise, ever since it went to auction in 2004, the one-of-a-kind Mondial has stayed in owner John Goodman’s eclectic collection in Seattle, Washington. That’s where _FORZA) first caught up with this unique piece of Prancing Horse history, as seen in issue #131’s “Setting the Pace.”

Special thanks to Ercole Spada, Pablo Hohenlohe, Carlos Sánchez, Jonas Blanking, Anna Visconti, and Claudio Soffieti.