Miniature Grand Prix, major excitement

Ingap’s miniature cars once brought the enthusiasm and adrenalin of the racetrack into people’s homes. They evoked mini-renditions of the competitions that had become popular in Italy in the first half of the 1900s – the Mille Miglia and the Targa Florio, above all.

From 1919 to 1972, Ingap (Industria Nazionale Giocattoli Automatici Padova) fruitfully launched all kinds of toys, reaching the height of success in the late 1940s, when it had about six hundred employees on payroll and a catalog of four hundred models – many featuring a relatively advanced technology for the time.

Like competing toy manufacturers, Ingap designed models of all the most famous racecars that zoomed from Sicily to the Aosta Valley in those years: Bugatti, Maserati, Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, OM, Cisitalia…

But Ingap was one of the first to break into the market, and designed both copies of the vehicles racing in the Grand Prix and imaginary cars, according to the aesthetics of the time.

Here is a series of those models, now the object of an endless competition among collectors – who race to buy them from every corner of the world.