In this paper, we investigate the problem of how to optimally control a heavy-duty vehicle following another one, commonly referred as ad-hoc or non-cooperative platooning. The problem is formulated as an optimal control problem that exploits road topography information and the knowledge of the preceding vehicle speed trajectory to compute the optimal engine torque and gear request for the vehicle under control. The optimal control problem is implemented by dynamic programming and is tested in a simulation study that compares the performance of multiple longitudinal control strategies. The proposed look-ahead adaptive cruise controller is able to achieve fuel saving up to 7% with respect to the use of a reference vehicle-following controller, by combining the benefits of adjusting the inter-vehicular distance according to the future slope with those of alternating phases of throttling and freewheeling (driving in neutral gear).