From the excellence of each brand to the building of the “Made in Italy” brand.
Formula 1 is one of the most powerful expressions of Italian industrial culture: behind the driver and behind every brand lies a collective intelligence capable of bringing together tradition, technology, design, and emotion.
In Madrid, that first team revealed an even greater one: the one made up of the companies that, together, build the “Made in Italy” brand.
Italy is a major exporter of meaning. It has always carried beyond its borders a way of conceiving products: an alliance between beauty, knowledge, craftsmanship, technology, and emotion. It is not a quality added at the end of the process, but a culture of making, built up through workshops, laboratories, businesses, and generations. Formula 1 is one of the places where this culture reaches its most radical expression.
On September 10, in the gardens of Palazzo Amboage, home of the Italian Embassy in Madrid, the event Dall’Italia a Madrid: la passione viaggia in Formula 1 brought together institutions, companies, and key players in the automotive industry on the eve of the Grand Prix’s return to the Spanish capital, forty-five years after the last race held in Madrid.
Organized by the Italian Embassy in collaboration with ICE and IFEMA Madrid, the event was attended by Stefano Domenicali, President and CEO of Formula 1; José Vicente de los Mozos, President of IFEMA Madrid; Andrea Pontremoli, CEO of Dallara and President of Motor Valley and MUNER; Geronimo La Russa, President of the Automobile Club of Italy; and Jérôme D’Ambrosio, Deputy Team Principal of Scuderia Ferrari.
Also in attendance were representatives from Pirelli, Pininfarina, Marelli, Racing Bulls, DZ Engineering, and Racing Force Group, along with approximately four hundred guests from institutions, the business world, the technology sector, academia, and the media. The most revealing aspect of that afternoon, however, was not the succession of illustrious names, but the structure that emerged behind them: a team within another team.
Formula 1 retains the appearance of an individual epic. We see the driver, his face before the start, his reflexes, and his ability to make decisions in a fraction of a second. Victory seems to be concentrated in a single figure, because he is the one who steps onto the podium.
But no driver races alone.
Behind every single-seater lies a collective intelligence made up of engineers, designers, mechanics, strategists, and specialists in materials, tires, electronics, aerodynamics, and data analysis. This is the first team: the internal group of each brand, a community of diverse expertise organized around a common goal.
It’s easy to be captivated by the talent and courage of those on the front lines. Formula 1, however, reminds us of a less obvious truth: individual excellence reaches its full potential only when it encounters an organization capable of creating and sustaining the ecosystem that makes it possible.
Ferrari is not just the driver dressed in red. Pirelli is not simply the tire we see during a pit stop. Pininfarina is not limited to the beauty of a design. Each of these companies embodies a tapestry of accumulated knowledge, intergenerational transmission, and shared effort. The team allows the brand’s meaning to endure over time, eventually becoming an expression of a deeply Italian culture.
In Madrid, a second dimension emerged. The companies present have different histories, interests, and corporate cultures. Some even compete with one another.
The most beautiful thing is that, when they come together outside of Italy, their individual identities begin to form a greater identity.
Every brand is a team, but together they form another: the “Marca Italia.”
The “Made in Italy,” as much envied as it is recognized, is the image that reaches the rest of the world: design, creativity, innovation, quality, style, sensibility, and industrial capability. The “Sistema Paese” is the structure that makes this image possible: businesses, institutions, universities, research centers, regions, specialized training, and human capital all working in tandem. The “Marca Italia” brand captivates; the “Country System” gives it substance.
Andrea Pontremoli summed up this idea in a particularly effective phrase: we must move from the “ego-system” to the “eco-system.” Italian competitiveness does not depend solely on the strength of a single large company, but on the quality of the relationships forged between large conglomerates, family-owned businesses, suppliers, universities, and training centers.
Italy’s Motor Valley embodies this logic. It is not merely a geographic concentration of companies linked to the automotive world, but a cultural region where knowledge circulates, becomes specialized, is transmitted, and is transformed. Here, mechanical heritage and advanced research coexist, as do family businesses and large-scale industry, artisanal know-how and high-performance engineering.
Excellence ceases to be an isolated quality and becomes a system.
Between the team of every company and the one that builds the “Made in Italy” brand, there is a less tangible bond: a sense of belonging. Belonging does not simply mean occupying a place within an organization. It means identifying with a history, understanding what one has received, and taking responsibility for advancing it without distorting it; it means identifying with an identity.
Belonging is not a complacent celebration of national character. It is something more demanding: it compels one to live up to a legacy and transforms the reputation inherited into a present-day responsibility. For major Italian brands, the past serves not merely as an archive or an advertising gimmick. It becomes a benchmark. Innovation requires understanding what must remain, what can evolve, and what must be reimagined.
The collaboration with Spain completes the virtuous cycle outside the homeland. Spain did not bring an equivalent array of automakers, but rather the institutional, organizational, and territorial structure that made the new Grand Prix possible: IFEMA Madrid, MADRING, the city itself, and a strategy designed to integrate the capital into the international Formula 1 circuit.
Italy showcased its industrial ecosystem. Spain provided the venue where this ecosystem could expand, forge relationships, and discover new opportunities. Bilateral collaboration does not stem from doing the same things, but from the ability to combine different areas of expertise.
Italy brings its tradition in motorsports, design, engineering, and specialized training; Madrid provides infrastructure, connectivity, organizational capacity, and the determination to create a Grand Prix with its own identity and a lasting legacy.
In 2025, trade between the two countries reached approximately 71 billion euros. But numbers alone do not explain the nature of a relationship. Collaboration gains genuine depth when economic exchange also becomes a flow of knowledge, talent, research, and corporate culture.
The Spanish Grand Prix trophy, designed by Pininfarina, gives tangible form to this dialogue: an Italian company interprets one of the symbols of the new Madrid circuit through design. Italy designs; Madrid sees itself reflected in the result.
In Madrid, Italy did not merely showcase a series of outstanding companies. It demonstrated these companies’ ability to recognize themselves as part of a collective endeavor.
First come the people who build each brand; then the brands that build a country.
Finally, a country that connects its own knowledge with that of another to open up new possibilities.
On the track, brands compete. Off the track, true intelligence lies in knowing how to collaborate. The checkered flag makes visible, for just a few seconds, what the culture of the Tricolore has learned to do over generations.
