Sunday, March 9, 2008

Lamborghini





Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A., commonly referred to as Lamborghini, is an Italian manufacturer of high performance sports cars based in the small Italian village of Sant'Agata Bolognese, near Bologna. Lamborghini is now a subsidiary of German car manufacturer Audi AG, which is in turn a subsidiary of Volkswagen Group. Lamborghini's latest model, the Reventón, is one of the fastest and most expensive of the Italian supercars. The company was founded in 1963 by businessman Ferruccio Lamborghini, who owned a successful tractor factory, Lamborghini Trattori S.p.A..

Ferruccio Lamborghini had set a rule that Lamborghini would not be involved in motor racing. He saw such a program as too expensive and too demanding in company resources. Consequently, no Lamborghini racing car was fabricated under his management. The closest the company came to building racing cars at that time was when the company's test driver Bob Wallace made a few highly modified prototypes based on existing models. Notable among these are the Miura SV based Jota and the Jarama S based Bob Wallace Special.

Under the management of Rosetti, Lamborghini entered into an agreement with BMW to build a production racing car in sufficient quantity for homologation. However, Lamborghini found itself unable to fulfill their part of the agreement. The car was eventually developed in-house by the BMW Motorsport Division, and was manufactured and sold as the BMW M1.

Lamborghini developed the QVX for the 1986 Group C championship season. One car was built, but lack of sponsorship caused it to miss the season. The QVX competed in only one race, the non-championship 1986 Southern Suns 500 km race at Kyalami in South Africa, driven by Tiff Needell. Despite the car finishing better than it started, sponsorship could not be found and the program was canceled.

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