The Bull is Loose

Racing barely featured in Lamborghini’s first half-century of building supercar exotica, but that’s changing rapidly as the Italian icon unleashes its first in-house GT3 car.

Men of a certain age will remember the poster that every boy who became a car nut (and many who didn’t) had on his wall – a Lamborghini Countach, usually red, and often with a scantily clad woman sprawled on the hood. The Countach was low, powerful, impractical… It was the perfect icon of late 1970s and ’80s excess and the most outrageous car anyone might conceive. Those lucky enough to see one in person probably can remember to this day where and when they first laid eyes on the Marcello Gandini-designed beast.

Where they weren’t spotted, in all likelihood, was on the racetrack. While most performance car manufacturers participated in motorsports to prove their product – and in the case of Enzo Ferrari, built road cars to finance the racing – Lamborghini never showed much interest, even though the car company was inspired by Ferrari himself. The story goes that tractor builder Ferruccio Lamborghini was so tired of his Ferraris breaking, and so incensed by Ferrari’s response to his complaints, that he launched his own car company.

Yet despite building some of the most powerful, fastest cars on the planet, racing was never in the cards, at least from a factory standpoint. True, there was the short-lived Formula 1 engine program while the company was owned by Chrysler, but it never saw success. After Chrysler jettisoned the supercar maker to a group of Indonesian investors, Volkswagen took an interest, and made it part of the Audi Brand Group. That changed everything.

It started with product, first the Murcielago and then the Gallardo, which provided the platform for the Audi R8 road car a few years later.

The R8, given its namesake, was envisioned as a racecar from the start, so why not the Gallardo, too? It began with a one-make series, which blossomed into a GT3 car built by Reiter Engineering, a German race-prep company which had already built race versions of the Diablo and Murcielago. The program fully bloomed with the creation of Lamborghini Squadra Corse in 2013, and even more so with the introduction of the Huracán, an aluminum-composite hybrid chassis with a 610hp V10 and all-wheel drive, developed alongside the newest iteration of the R8.

“Starting from 2013, when we decided to create Lamborghini’s Squadra Corse, the first motorsports department in our history, the company has decided to consider motorsport as one of the assets of the company from the marketing point of view,” says Giorgio Sanna, who was named earlier this year as head of motorsport for Lamborghini Squadra Corse and is himself a noted test driver and GT racer. “It’s quite easy to see the effort in the motorsports activities is completely different and increased compared to the past.”

Get the full version of this article in The GT Issue II of RACER magazine, on sale now. Take a video tour of the issue below...