As Lamborghini celebrates its 60th anniversary this year, it’s gearing up to take on the ultimate challenge for a sportscar manufacturer: a bid for outright honours at the Le Mans 24 Hours. The attack on the centrepiece round of the World Endurance Championship with a new LMDh prototype run by the Iron Lynx team will be the first such campaign in those 60 years. It’s been a long haul to endurance racing’s top table for the marque, both in the context of its storied existence and the project that has resulted in the prototype racer we now call the SC63.
Ferruccio Lamborghini, who branched out from producing tractors and farm machinery, shied away from motor racing. He built his first sportscar as a result of dissatisfaction with his Ferrari road car, believing that the focus of the Prancing Horse was distracted from creating the ultimate gran turismo by its racing efforts. This antipathy was probably tinged by his own unsuccessful exploits in competition. He crashed a modified Fiat Topolino on the 1948 Mille Miglia, his machine ending up inside a bar!
The company founder, who died in 1993, ceded control of Lamborghini barely 10 years after its creation, yet still racing was off the agenda at the Sant’Agata Bolognese headquarters between Bologna and Modena as ownership of the marque passed through various hands. And when it did go racing, it wasn’t in the natural habitat for a sportscar brand.
Chrysler bought Lamborghini in 1987 and decided that Formula 1 should be its playground. That resulted in the establishment of Lamborghini Engineering under Ferrari design legend Mauro Forghieri and a 3.5-litre V12 used between 1989 and 1993 by Larrousse, Lotus, Ligier, Minardi and an arm’s length squad of its own known as Modena Team.
It wouldn’t be until the turn of the century that Lamborghinis properly started competing in the burgeoning world of GT racing – and the cars weren’t developed by the factory. GT boss Stephane Ratel had pushed through a rule allowing what he called “special tuners” to homologate cars for racing. Reiter Engineering took up the baton, going it alone with a GT1 version of the Diablo in 2000. Lamborghini, now in the hands of the Volkswagen group and under the control of Audi, initially provided support – financial and technical – when the German operation switched to the Murcielago in 2003.
The Murcielago R-GT was a race winner in the FIA GT Championship, but Reiter’s big success came with the creation of the GT3 class in 2006. It would deliver a total of 132 GT3 Gallardos in multiple iterations and evolutions, built with tacit support from Lamborghini. Reiter had to buy complete cars from the factory, chucking everything it didn’t need from the road car into a giant warehouse, for the first 50 examples. Only then did the manufacturer allow it to buy just the parts it needed.
Source: Autosport