Chapter 1 From Tractors to Cars Lamborghinis are not your average car They’re not even your average luxury car They are some of the most expensive cars on the planet They are powerful cars driven by 12-cylinder engines capable of 670 horsepower as much power as your average 18-wheeler truck In expert hands they can hit 211 mph 340 km h and can go from 0 to 60 mph 97 km h in 2 8 seconds The car of choice Lamborghinis do not have fully automatic transmissions and not all have stability control systems They are not cars that take care of drivers They are cars that drivers control That is what their drivers want to have control over unmatched power in a car that has been designed with elegance They may be driven by princes and billionaires but believe it or not Lamborghinis were invented by a tractor maker Everything in a Lamborghini’s design and construction epitomizes supercar style and power 4
Ferruccio Lamborghini When Lamborghini was founded in 1963 Italy was home to famous car companies like Fiat Ferrari Maserati and Alfa Romeo It was a crowded field but within two years Lamborghini had taken its place alongside these companies as a maker of great fast and fancy cars It had an unlikely beginning Ferruccio Lamborghini the company’s founder was born on a grape farm in 1916 As a young man he preferred fixing equipment to tending grapes Seeing his talent his parents sent him to a technical institute near Bologna to study mechanics In 1940 he was drafted into the Royal Italian Air Force where he served as a mechanic during World War II Returning home after the war Ferruccio opened an auto repair shop and garage Italy needs tractors Times were hard in postwar Italy Farmers in particular had a problem there were no tractors The country’s auto plants had been building war equipment since the late 1930s What tractors could be found were old and run down To solve this problem Ferruccio Lamborghini took parts from abandoned military equipment and built a tractor for his parents People were so impressed by the Lamborghini family’s new tractor that neighbors asked Ferruccio to build tractors for them as well The charging bull logo is now recognized all over the world as the badge of a car in a class of its own The charging bull Ferruccio Lamborghini was fascinated by bullfighting In 1962 just before founding Automobili Lamborghini he visited the ranch of Don Eduardo Miura a famous breeder of Spanish fighting bulls Ferruccio was so impressed by the animals that he adopted the image of the raging bull as the emblem for his company Several of his car models have bullfighting-related names including the Murciélago the Urraco the Jalpa and the Miura 5
Lamborghini Tractori By 1948 Ferruccio had established Lamborghini Tractori which he operated out of his garage Within two years the company produced over 1,000 tractors By 1960 Lamborghini Tractori was one of Italy’s largest manufacturers of agricultural equipment and Ferruccio was one of the richest men in the country Not fast enough Ferruccio Lamborghini loved fast cars He had enough Alfa Romeos and Maseratis to drive a different one every day of the week The cars were the best on the market but none of them pleased him They felt heavy and did not really go very fast he said Ferruccio wanted a grand tourer or gran turismo in Italian a vehicle to speed the driver across the countryside in luxury with controls that responded quickly to the driver’s command In search of perfection In an interview with Sporting Motorist magazine in 1964 Ferruccio said I have bought some of the most expensive gran turismo cars and in each of these magnificent cars I have found some faults Too hot Or uncomfortable Or not sufficiently fast Or not perfectly finished Now I want to make a GT car without faults Ferruccio bought a Ferrari 250 GT in 1958 Putting the car through its paces he would often grind the gears forcing him to take the car back to Ferrari to be fixed 6 Lamborghini’s founder Ferruccio with one of his supercars and one of his famous tractors
On water Although Lamborghini saw himself as a car builder in 1968 he couldn’t resist installing a four-liter V12 engine on a powerboat Lamborghini prototyped a boat called the Quetzal but decided instead to supply the engines for offshore racing In 1984 Count Renato della Valle used a Lamborghini engine to win the round Britain race More recently an 8 2-liter V12 Lamborghini engine powered the boat Spirit of Norway to victory in 2002 7
