Fondmetal S.p.A. was an Italian manufacturer of alloy wheels established in 1972 by Gabriele Rumi in Brescia, growing from an iron foundry business his grandfather had founded. Rumi's passion for motorsport led him to sponsor driver Piercarlo Ghinzani from 1983 onwards, and Fondmetal wheels were subsequently supplied to Williams, Tyrrell, and Ligier during the mid-1980s. From 1989, Fondmetal became the primary sponsor of the Osella team, and by 1990 Rumi held a majority stake. At the close of that year he assumed complete ownership, relocated the operation from Volpiano near Turin to his headquarters in Bergamo, and entered the 1991 season under the Fondmetal Corse name.
Fondmetal's first season was characterised by the limitations inherited from Osella. The initial car, the FA1M-E, was a carry-over from 1989 — Osella had been unable to design a new car in 1990. Olivier Grouillard drove the blue-and-grey machine, which used Cosworth engines prepared by Brian Hart. The car was so uncompetitive that even Pedro Chaves's Coloni regularly outpaced it in pre-qualifying, and passes through pre-qualifying were rare.
Rumi had invested in a British design subsidiary called Fomet, based in Bicester and headed by Tino Belli. A new car, the Fomet-1, appeared from the San Marino Grand Prix with revised aerodynamics and suspension. The new design improved matters modestly. Grouillard managed to qualify tenth for the Mexican Grand Prix, ahead of Andrea de Cesaris's Jordan. Late in the season Grouillard was replaced by former AGS driver Gabriele Tarquini, who scored two classified finishes from three attempts. No championship points were recorded.
The winter of 1991–92 brought crisis before it brought progress. Tino Belli sold the designs for the new Fomet car to the Larrousse team, leaving Fondmetal without a competitive chassis for 1992. In December 1991 Rumi commissioned Sergio Rinland of the Astauto design office to create an entirely new car. Because Rinland's design was not ready for the start of the year, the team began the season running the previous year's car fitted with a Ford HB V8 engine sourced from the outgoing Benetton programme. The combination of an ill-matched engine and an aging chassis produced cooling problems and poor reliability. Tarquini and Swiss debutant Andrea Chiesa drove the early-season entries.
Rinland's new chassis, designated the GR02, arrived in late spring. It was a genuinely fresh design with roots in work Rinland had begun at Brabham on the unbuilt BT61. Tarquini found it a marked improvement. At the 1992 Belgian Grand Prix, Tarquini put in the team's best qualifying performance of the season by placing eleventh on the grid. Chiesa struggled to qualify consistently and was replaced by Belgian driver Eric van de Poele for the Hungarian Grand Prix. Van de Poele proved competitive but spun off on the third lap, eliminating Fondmetal's best remaining chance of a points finish that season.
The team's mounting debt, compounded by a global recession, proved terminal. After the Italian Grand Prix in September 1992, Fondmetal withdrew from the championship. Tarquini had qualified for all thirteen rounds the team entered in 1992; the car achieved a pair of tenth-place finishes but no points. Rumi contemplated entering pay-driver Giuseppe Bugatti at the Portuguese Grand Prix as a financial lifeline but instead chose to close the team.
The design work Rinland's Astauto office had begun on a projected 1993 car was eventually sold to Guido Forti. That design, considerably aged by the time it reached the track, became the basis of the Forti FG01 that competed in 1995 and 1996. Elements of the 1992 Fondmetal GR02 could still be identified in the Forti chassis.
Rumi himself returned to Formula One in a reduced capacity from 1994, with Fondmetal as a technical partner and sponsor of Tyrrell and later Minardi. He leased Fondmetal's wind tunnel in northern Italy to both teams. His interest in Minardi deepened to the point of co-ownership and chairmanship, and in 2000 he rebadged the team's Ford Zetec-R engines under the Fondmetal name. Rumi died of cancer in May 2001 before seeing that arrangement through to its conclusion, when the team was sold to Paul Stoddart. The Fondmetal wheel company remains in operation.
The Fondmetal Formula One team sits in the category of late-turbo-era and early-naturally-aspirated-era operations that were perpetually short of the resources needed to close the gap to the front. Tarquini's displays in qualifying during 1992 suggested that the GR02 was a genuine step forward, and with greater financial stability it might have challenged for points. As it was, the team's identity was bound up with Rumi's personal enthusiasm and the Fondmetal wheel brand rather than a sustainable racing infrastructure, and the recession of the early 1990s eliminated any margin that might have allowed the project to survive.