Podium Technology: “We were already using Motul with Glickenhaus’ Nürburgring racing”

Aosta, Italy. Near Turin, the home of great automotive design. But one company is putting the city on the map for much more innovative reasons. Podium Technology is an advanced technology business helping car manufacturers and motorsport teams take their vehicles to the next level. For a decade, it has been working with Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus as a technical partner. On the eve of Glickenhaus’ new partnership with Motul, we caught up with Podium Technology’s founding partner, and head of automotive engineering and motorsport, Luca Ciancetti.

From an automotive and motorsport point of view, Scuderia Cameron Glickenhaus is one of our main customers. We are a good technical partner for them. Glickenhaus Racing is the only niche manufacturer that’s actually racing. If you think of all our competitors, even the small ones, none of them races in top class and top-level endurance racing. This is to showcase the reliability; technology and quality of what Glickenhaus delivers in terms of cars and performance. On the racing side, I look after Glickenhaus’ racing activities. Basically, they gave me the responsibility to be the team principle for both the Le Mans and Nürburgring teams. It's a very good relationship and of course, we’re partners. I work very closely with James Glickenhaus (the company founder) on the management and decision making.

Yes, we’ve been working with Glickenhaus for 10 years now. We started the big adventure with the 2010 SCG P4/5 Competizione at the Nürburgring in 2011, for the second season of that car. And we’ve been working with James Glickenhaus on the SCG003, the carbon-made car that’s been racing at the Nürburgring from 2014 to 2019. Now, we’re involved with the design and support for many of their cars including the SCG04C that’s racing at the Nürburgring and the SCG007 LMH, which is the new car for Le Mans.

We’re quite a young company. We were founded in 2011. All the partners, we’re former engineering students from Turin, Italy. I founded the company with my partners right after my PHD. Before this, I was a student at university. And we’re basically involved in three main business lines: automotive engineering and design, e-mobility (we’re quite a big player in the high-performance battery systems), and motorsport.

We founded it because Turin is well known all over the world for style and design. We felt that there was a space for a company here that was more focused on mechanics, electronics and electric powertrains, and we had this background from our studies. A few months after leaving university, we found the opportunity to start working with vehicles, and after that other customers joined, and the company has since grown very fast. For the past few years, we’ve been listed as one of the Financial Times’ 1000 fastest growing companies in Europe.

We know Motul’s products very well. Recently we had a technical meeting with Motul, and I told them that we’ve been already using Motul’s products in our Glickenhaus team for the Nürburgring. We were never in contact with Motul from a technical and commercial point of view before, but we were already using their products and were very happy.