May 2013 will go down in history as the month that Lamborghini celebrated its 50th anniversary, proudly proclaiming ‘100 years of innovation in half the time.’ The story of the brand’s history is one worth sharing.
It took a snub from Ferrari, of all companies, to get the raging bull going in the first place. Ferruccio Lamborghini made tractors – and made them well. In the late 1950s his company was one of the largest agriculture machinery makers in Italy, and he had the money to indulge in his interest in fast, luxurious cars.
Despite thinking them too noisy and impractical to be proper grand tourers, he owned several Ferraris. One day, the clutch broke on one of them. Upon taking it apart, Lamborghini discovered it was identical to the one he used in his tractors. Understandably annoyed, he sought an audience with a certain Mr Ferrari with a view to asking for a better replacement. Ferrari called him ‘a mere tractor maker’ and told him he could know nothing about building sports cars.
Now thoroughly riled, Lamborghini decided to plough his wealth into a brand new car company. Starting from nothing, he commissioned Società Autostar to build a V12 for his first car. Crucially, he asked Autostar to make it not for the race track but for the road, with the intention of creating something much more refined and luxurious than the contemporary Ferraris.
Giotto Bizzarrini, an ex-Ferrari engineer who was now leading the team at Autostar, delivered a 3.5-litre V12 with 360bhp at a jaw-dropping 9,800rpm. This was not what Lamborghini ordered. The high engine speed and dry sump design screamed racing, not refinement.
Legal disputes followed, and although Lamborghini’s first car, the 350GTV, did premiere at the Turin Motor Show in October 1963, it had no engine and apparently had to have a collection of bricks mounted under the bonnet to create the proper ride height. There were encouraging words from the press, so Automobili Ferruccio Lamborghini S.p.A was officially created on October 30.
Still furious at Ferrari’s rudeness, Lamborghini went in search of land to build his factory. There was a long, almost straight piece of road near Sant’Agata Bolognese; a road that Ferrari and Maserati used to test their cars’ speed. At the one slight bend, they had to slow down. Rumours from the present Lamborghini factory say that Ferruccio strolled into the fields beside that bend, walked around a little and then bought the land for his new factory. He was already getting up Ferrari’s nose.
But if he was seen as little more than a minor annoyance at first, that all changed in 1966 when a concept known inoffensively as the P400 was displayed at the Geneva Motor Show. It almost didn’t make it, with the Bertone-styled bodywork only having been finished days before. Like the 350 GTV concept, a missing engine was replaced with ballast.
Engine or not, the P400 rocked the world. It mounted the engine behind a two-seat cabin in what was a dual first for Lamborghini. A long bonnet and a stunning, sleek profile that took the industry’s breath away sealed Lamborghini’s rise to glory and guaranteed its heritage through future turmoil. This concept became the 1967 Miura.
Lamborghini expanded his workforce as the orders rolled in. A stiffer, more powerful Miura S arrived in 1968, and deliveries rose to 353 for the year. But as 1970 approached, things began to look extremely bad for Lamborghini. Large tractor orders were being cancelled left, right and centre, eventually forcing him to sell his controlling stake in his foundation agricultural business.
A couple of years later, with prototypes missing motor shows, a dearth of new models and growing financial trouble, Lamborghini was forced to sell 51 per cent of Automobili Ferruccio Lamborghini S.p.A to a wealthy Swiss businessman – incidentally a friend of his. The sum was a reported $600,000 (€447,381).
Things only got worse, with the global 1973 oil crisis seriously hitting the sales of performance cars. There was a seed of something great though, left over from Ferruccio’s stewardship. The LP 500 concept ultimately became the now-famous Countach in 1974 using a 4.0-litre V12, which had been downsized from the original 5.0-litre plan.
The Countach would become the firm’s best-selling car, but not without a fight. Bankruptcy hit in 1978, and despite the Countach’s eventual success in America following its introduction to the market there in 1982, its 19-year reign as probably the most brutal production supercar ever was brought to an end under Chrysler’s six-year tenure at the helm.
The Diablo – still a bedroom wall icon for children worldwide – became a legend in its own right after its launch in 1990, even though it was too expensive to sell well, but in truth, Lamborghini’s American owners just didn’t know what to do with the company. By 1994, they had sold it.
Audi took control in 1998, and the rest is modern history. The company was radically restructured according to German sensibilities before development began on the brand’s big comeback: the Murcielago. The name alone still strikes a mixture of fear and lust into the heart of any petrolhead.
From then on, the company has only grown in ambition. Its latest concepts, like the Veneno and the Egoista, have been just as outrageous and fantastic as the P400 of 1966. With production runs of just three and one respectively, it’s testament to the success of Lamborghini that the brand appeal is enough to justify building them. It might not be quite what Lamborghini planned, but the company is still getting up Ferrari’s nose, and you can’t help but think he’d approve.