Lamborghini
Ferruccio Lamborghini, born in 1916, had a fascination for engines. After his army service in World War II, he set up a car and motorcycle repair shop in Modena in northern Italy. There was a need for tractors in that agricultural area, and he began to build them from derelict military vehicles. As the Italian postwar economy recovered and grew, so did demand for his tractors. He built his own tractor engines, his business became very successful, and by 1960 his tractor production rate was 400 per month.
Having mastered the manufacture of tractors, Lamborghini got interested in high-performance cars. He always had been disappointed in Ferraris and Maseratis he had owned, particularly in their engines. He believed anything Ferrari did he could do better, so he decided to build his own car. To design it, he found a talented engineer who had worked on a Ferrari engine. His new twelve-cylinder, 3500-cubic centimeter engine had a crankshaft supported by seven main bearings, four camshafts, a short piston stroke, and four big-bore valves per cylinder developing 350 horsepower. This engine was the prototype for all future Lamborghinis.
Ferruccio displayed his first car as the 350 GT prototype at the 1963 Turin Auto Show. Sales started the following year. The 350 GT was a great success. The 400 GT and the 400 GT 2+2 with a small rear seat followed in 1966. These first cars made the Lamborghini name famous around the world. With the profits from sales of these cars and his tractors Ferruccio designed and constructed another car, the Miura, which made Lamborghini legendary.
The Miura engine, the twelve-cylinder quad-cam with a longer piston stroke that increased capacity to 4000 cubic centimeters, mounted transversely just behind the two-seat cabin, a design previously for Formula 1 race cars only. The body styling was aggressive and distinctive. The name Miura, inspired by the fierce Spanish fighting bulls, was appropriate.
In the four-seat Espada, Lamborghini mounted the engine in the front part of a steel platform chassis with all-independent suspension. Rear-wheel drive was through a five-speed manual or, in some mid-’70s models, a Chrysler automatic transmission. In production from 1968 to 1979, the Espada with its low, wide front end with four headlights flanking a blacked-out grill looked like no other car on the road.
At the 1973 Geneva Auto Show Lamborghini shocked the world again with the Countach. The wildest-looking Lamborghini ever, this car was the first to show the famous Lamborghini swing-up doors. Sophisticated suspension featured two coil springs on each side, dual shocks, and an anti-roll bar. The Countach had a 25-year production run in LP400, LP400S, LP500S, 5000QV, and 25th Anniversary versions.
In 1974 the Lamborghini tractor business had a major setback. The company lost a lot of money from cancellation of a massive South American order. A series of labor problems at the Lamborghini factory aggravated the adverse financial situation. Ferruccio decided to sell some of his interest, and eventually Fiat took control. The company retained his name after Ferruccio died in February 1993 at the age of 76.
The oil crisis of the ’70s made sales of high-performance cars difficult. In 1978, the company declared bankruptcy. A Swiss-based group saved the factory and turned the company around, developing the Countach further from the LP500S to the impressive QuattroValvole (QV) .
Then there was the sale to Chrysler. The two company cultures were different and relations got stressed at times, but they succeeded in bringing Chrysler resources to bear on the design and development of pollution controls and advanced manufacturing methods for a new car, the Diablo. Again the result was an outstanding success. The new Lamborghini Diablo, the fastest car in production when it appeared in 1990, got rave reviews everywhere, but then in 1994 Chrysler, to raise needed cash, sold the company to an Indonesian investment group which a few years later sold it to the German company Audi Aktien-Gesellschaft.
After Audi took over the factory in 2000, Diablo production increased dramatically, the new Murcielago arrived on the market and went on to sell 4,099 units, and in 2008 Lamborghini achieved its highest-ever yearly sales, 2,430 vehicles.
Visit the Lamborghini website: www.lamborghini.com
