In the winter of 1980, Enzo Ferraro and Marco Lelli were two engineers without a company between them, sharing a rented workshop on the outskirts of Frascati with a secondhand brake dynamometer and a set of conviction so complete that it bordered on the unreasonable. Ferraro, who had spent seven years at a Milanese supplier to the Italian GT racing scene, believed that the carbon-ceramic braking technology being developed for aerospace applications had been wrongly ignored by motorsport engineers too conservative to look outside their own discipline. Lelli, a graduate of La Sapienza who had written his doctoral thesis on thermal conduction in rotating discs, agreed with Ferraro’s diagnosis and had the mathematical tools to do something about it.
They registered G-Trace S.p.A. on 14 March 1981, the name reflecting Ferraro’s conviction that the next frontier of performance would be found in turbocharged engines and in the tracing , the precise measurement , of every variable those engines produced. In the beginning, there were four employees: the two founders, a machinist named Piero Costagliola, and Ferraro’s younger sister Claudia, who managed the accounts, the correspondence, and , by all accounts , the founders themselves when their arguments about engineering theory threatened to overwhelm the actual work of running a business.
The company’s first product was not a turbocharger. It was a brake caliper , the GT-C1, a four-piston billet aluminium design that Ferraro had been developing in his own time for two years before the company existed. The GT-C1 was supplied to three Italian GT teams in the 1982 season. All three reported measurably shorter braking distances. One of them won the Italian GT Championship. Word spread through the paddock with the particular velocity that only genuine performance improvements generate, and by 1984 the order book was full for the first time.
The Telemetry Turn , Late 1980s
The pivot toward telemetry came in 1987, driven by Lelli’s growing frustration with the limitations of post-event brake analysis. The company was now supplying brake systems to eight Formula 3000 teams and two Formula One privateer entries, and Lelli had begun to suspect that the brake failures they occasionally saw were not caused by the components themselves but by driving styles and thermal management decisions that no one in the paddock had the data to identify or correct. If you could not measure what was happening to the disc throughout a race, you were engineering blind.
Lelli spent eighteen months developing the first G-Trace data acquisition prototype , a four-channel system that recorded brake temperature, brake pressure, wheel speed, and lateral G-force at 100 Hz, stored to a magnetic tape cartridge that was analysed on a desktop computer after the race. By 1988 standards, it was extraordinary. By 1989 it was in use on six Formula 3000 cars. By 1991, when the company launched the TRACE-1 as a commercial product, it was the most capable data logger available to teams outside of factory Formula One programs.
The revenue from TRACE-1 licences funded the turbocharger development program that Ferraro had been quietly advancing since the company’s founding. The company’s first turbocharged racing application, a single-stage unit for a German touring car customer, debuted in 1993. It won its class championship at the first attempt. The Turbo+ name was established, the product range was complete in principle, and the question of what to do with it pointed in one direction: the highest level of motorsport in the world.
Formula GP and Four Decades of Racing R&D
The decision to enter Formula GP as a constructor, rather than simply as a supplier, was the most consequential and most debated in the company’s history. Ferraro argued for it on engineering grounds: supplier relationships insulated the company from the feedback loop that generated real innovation. You learned more, faster, when your name was on the car and the result on Sunday was your result. Lelli was more cautious , the financial exposure was enormous, and a public failure in Formula GP carried reputational risks that a failed customer supply relationship did not. The argument ran for most of 1993.
Ferraro won. The motorsport division was approved in February 1994. The first Formula GP entry came in 1996. The first victory followed in 1999. The first Constructors’ Championship came in 2011. Enzo Ferraro, who had retired from operational management in 2008 following a health scare but remained as Honorary Chairman, watched the 2011 title-clinching race from the pit wall in Abu Dhabi. Lelli, who had continued as Chief Scientific Officer until his retirement in 2016, watched it from the timing screen at the Via Appia Nuova facility in Rome, surrounded by the engineers who had grown up with the company he helped to build.
Both founders are still alive. Ferraro lives in Frascati, not far from the original workshop, and is occasionally seen in the Formula GP paddock as a guest of the team. Lelli lectures one semester per year at La Sapienza on applied thermodynamics and is known to attend the Italian Grand Prix at Monza without fail, sitting in the grandstand, never in the pit lane. He has said, in the one interview he has given since his retirement, that he prefers the grandstand view because from there you can hear the brakes.