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.
Lamborghini was waking up to motorsport. It had started its long-running Super Trofeo series in 2009 with a Gallardo developed by Reiter but built at the factory like two previous iterations of one-make racer, the Diablo SV-R and GTR of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The turning point on the road to a bid for outright Le Mans honours came in 2013 with the establishment of the in-house Lamborghini Squadra Corse operation to develop and build both its spec racers and a new GT3 Huracan.
Squadra Corse was and is headed up by Giorgio Sanna, a sometime Audi Sport Italia works driver in the big-banger Superstars touring car series. Lamborghini’s graduation to the pinnacle of sportscar racing owes much to his tenacity. He has been described as “like a terrier” by one insider in his attempts to get the prototype programme across the line.
Sanna’s desire to take Lamborghini prototype racing predate the convergence process that created the LMDh pathway into the WEC Hypercar class. The Italian manufacturer was at the table in 2019 as IMSA started working on the successor to the Daytona Prototype international class introduced in 2017.
"The request of the board was to be able to start to race in 2024: we have evaluated all the different scenarios and the best one was Ligier" Giorgio Sanna
“We were always in love with the philosophy of IMSA,” says Sanna, who points out that the USA is the marque’s biggest market. “We started with a strong interest to race in America with very nice cars, sophisticated but sustainable from a cost point of view.”
Sanna can’t answer whether Lamborghini would have produced a car for a class provisionally known as DPi 2.0 had there been no convergence. But he suggests that it became “quite an easy decision” once the new class was cleared to race in the WEC as well as in IMSA. Lamborghini will be represented in both series next year with Iron Lynx and the SC63.
But Sanna’s comments underplay his efforts to convince his board to take Lamborghini prototype racing. There was a thorough examination of LMDh in 2020 and a proposal to produce a car in conjunction with Dallara. The project was never signed off: it was reputedly turned down more than once.
Sanna then changed tack. He looked to piggyback on the Porsche-led LMDh programme that originally involved Audi. Why Sanna’s efforts on this front weren’t successful in light of the decision to axe the sister car to the 963 isn’t entirely clear, though the consensus is that Porsche said no to Lamborghini joining the party. Sanna will only say that “the group was looking to come up with a strategy that fitted perfectly with the needs of every brand”.
When Lamborghini finally got the sign-off, announced in May 2022, it chose to partner with Ligier Automotive, the only one of the four licensed LMP2 constructors without an LMDh deal. Sanna explains that the board decision was independent of the one to align with Ligier.
“Until you have the green light you cannot commit to anyone,” he says. “The request of the board was to be able to start to race in 2024: we have evaluated all the different scenarios and the best one was Ligier.”
He admits that the “others were already committed” by that stage. It appears certain that Lamborghini went back to Dallara at this point, only to be told that its deals with Acura and Cadillac meant it wouldn’t be able to deliver a car for 2024. Ligier, insists Sanna, is a good fit for Lamborghini: “We were looking for a partner like Ligier, which is small but with the right competence, very similar to Lamborghini Squadra Corse.”
Squadra Corse has also developed its own engine for the first time. The new 3.8-litre twin-turbo V8 is the first bespoke racing engine produced by Lamborghini since Forghieri’s F1 V12. The partner for the engine project is Autotecnica Motori, which was also involved in developments to the Huracan GT3’s V10 in the EVO and EVO2 versions introduced respectively in 2019 and 2023.
The deal for Iron Lynx to be Lamborghini’s partner in both the WEC and IMSA’s GTP class was announced in November 2022, though it was in the works a long time before that. Iron Lynx, established in 2017 and a participant in the WEC since 2021 in GTE Am, had an eye on Hypercar before the link-up with Sant’Agata. The purchase of a majority stake in single-seater powerhouse Prema in the summer of 2021 by Iron Lynx parent company DC Racing Solutions was made with an eye on the top class of sportscar racing.
The first step was an entry into the LMP2 arena last year, with twin assaults on the WEC and the European Le Mans Series with a pair of ORECA-Gibson 07s. A new branch of the team known as Prema Engineering will effectively run the LMDh attack under the Iron Lynx banner from new facilities in Vicenza, close to Prema’s existing headquarters, as well as in Detroit.
“When Prema became part of the family two years ago, we started to prepare the team that will be our LMDh team,” says Iron Lynx team boss Andrea Piccini. “We wanted to show that we would be ready to be a partner for an important brand in such a programme. The idea of having an LMP2 team started before the contact with Lamborghini.”
The Iron Lynx/Prema set-up is billed as Lamborghini’s “reference team” by Sanna. What that actually means is that it will be the marque’s only representative in Hypercar and GTP over the full lifespan of the SC63 up to the end of 2027. That’s a departure from the previous intent outlined by Lamborghini. It had stated that it had planned to follow the business model it ploughed in GT3 by providing support to multiple teams on a semi-factory basis.
“We have to keep in consideration the size and the capability of our structure, and we prefer to keep focused on one team whether we are managing one car, two cars, four cars, because the programme is very demanding,” explains Sanna. “We are also the rookie in the field.”
The programme in year one will be for a single car in WEC and another in IMSA, though only in the endurance rounds starting with the Sebring 12 Hours in March. Further US outings will follow at Watkins Glen, the new Indianapolis long-distance race, and Petit Le Mans at Road Atlanta. The IMSA car will also join the full-season WEC entry for a two-car attack at Le Mans. A full IMSA programme and an expanded two-car attack on the WEC in 2025 appear likely, though Lamborghini and Iron Lynx are playing their cards close to their chests for the moment.
“Running two teams is already quite ambitious, which is why we committed only doing one car on each side, and only the endurance races in IMSA,” says Piccini. “We want to do things step by step.”
Four drivers have so far been revealed for what will be a six-strong squad. Mirko Bortolotti and Andrea Caldarelli, both members of the factory line-up since the Huracan entered competition in 2015, were first to be named, followed by ex-F1 drivers Romain Grosjean and Daniil Kvyat. The final two will be announced at the end of this season. Mercedes GT star Raffaele Marciello was due to be one, but he has been poached by BMW. How they will line up across the two programmes hasn’t been revealed, though Grosjean’s bid to stay in IndyCar means that he will focus on IMSA.
The SC63 was given a shakedown at Vallelunga pretty much on schedule at the start of August, which was followed by a first proper test at Imola. The car racked up approximately 1500km over two days with Bortolotti, Caldarelli and Kvyat driving. The test programme then hit a setback when Bortolotti crashed the first car at Paul Ricard.
Lamborghini and Iron Lynx have tried to play down the significance of a break of more than a month, Piccini suggesting that they can "still keep to the our schedule"
Lamborghini hasn’t revealed the extent of the damage, though it forced the cancellation of a subsequent run at Spa at the start of September. The full resumption of testing came only last week with three days of running at Almeria in southern Spain when Grosjean got his first taste of the car. Lamborghini and Iron Lynx have tried to play down the significance of a break of more than a month, Piccini suggesting that they can “still keep to the our schedule”.
Lamborghini never planned to take in the first round of the Michelin-sponsored Endurance Cup segment of the IMSA series, the Daytona 24 Hours in January, though it had hinted that it could reverse that call based on the results of testing. That appears unlikely now, which means the race debut of the SC63 will be at the opening WEC round in Qatar in early March.
Finally, a marque that began without racing aspirations will go head to head with Ferrari at the top of the sportscar racing tree.
Not such an illustrious history
Lamborghini and Le Mans haven’t been happy bedfellows over the years. No-shows, non-qualifications and retirements – two after a single lap – have featured in the marque’s sporadic appearances or non-appearances at the Circuit de la Sarthe.
A Lamborghini first graced the hallowed asphalt in 1975 when French privateer Paul Rilly, who wanted to fulfil a life’s ambition by racing at Le Mans, ended up taking a Lamborghini Islero entered in the GTX class for production GT cars after abandoning plans to drive first a Ferrari and then a Porsche. A road car purchased in the run-up to the event was hastily converted into a racer, the modifications including a suspension and brake sports kit sold to Rilly by the factory.
The car shared with friend Roger Le Veve was beset by problems through qualifying and didn’t come close to making the cut. Its best lap was only just under five and a half minutes.
A Lamborghini developed in Britain might sound like heresy, and certainly was regarded as such in some quarters in Sant’Agata Bolognese. A British operation known as Amos International Motorsport had it in writing that it could develop the Diablo into a GT1 car in 1995 and the promise of a supply of racing engines from the factory.
The engine wasn’t ready when the unfinished car, known as the AIM Lamborghini Jota GT1, was shown in the pits at the Le Mans Test Day at the end of April. After a single test at Paul Ricard with a hack engine, the Le Mans assault was shelved. A legal case followed and the Jota GT1 never raced.
Reiter Engineering’s Murcielago R-GT raced at Le Mans every year between 2006 and 2010. Or perhaps that should be ‘raced’. Four of the entries were made by the Japan Lamborghini Owners’ Club, which on two occasions managed but a single lap before retirement. The first of those early baths came in 2007 when the driveshafts JLOC had developed for the car pulled out of the hubs.
