61 Years in, Lamborghini Is Finally Ready to Go Racing

You know the Lamborghini origin story. Tractor builder Ferrucio Lamborghini was unhappy with the specifics of his harsh and fragile Ferrari road cars, so he started to build his own grand tourers and, eventually, supercars. In sharp contrast to Ferrari, which was, at the time, in the middle of a run of seven Le Mans wins in eight attempts, Lamborghini opted not to race his cars. They were road cars, and they would be proved on the road.

The automotive landscape has changed a lot in the past 61 years. In one regard, it has not. After a long break, racing only in Formula 1 and GT categories, Ferrari came back to the top class at Le Mans just last year and won again. That makes Ferrari again the target at Lamborghini, where a serious topflight racing program is now underway for the first time ever.

And that does mean ever. The SC63 Le Mans hypercar is the culmination of a Squadra Corse racing program built recently from the ground up—a program that was, until this car's launch, focused on GT racing and the limited professional applications of cars built for those rule sets. Before Squadra Corse, Lamborghini's entire racing history was one of oddball one-off programs that are remembered as mere trivia.

The best was a Formula 1 car built for a program called Modena Team as part of a short-lived customer deal in just the 1991 season. That car never scored a single point, the team disappeared before 1992, and the "Chrysler powered by Lamborghini" V-12 at its heart was more notable for the time it spent in the back of a Minardi. That less-than-halfhearted brief shot at F1 was the closest thing the brand ever had to a racing pedigree in its first 50 years.

Squadra Corse changed everything. First, it was a program for Gallardo spec racing. Then came the Huracán GT3, a long-lived machine that has been refreshed twice. The ubiquity of the GT3 class meant that the Huracán got Lamborghini into GT racing fields globally, allowing Lamborghini customers to compete against the best from Ferrari and Porsche in a wide variety of IMSA, DTM, and SRO GT events. Wins and championships around the world proved that the company could build a competitive car, and a growing roster of factory talent to support the cars prepared Lamborghini well for what came next.

"Ferruccio Lamborghini, unlike other founders, always said that he did not need to go racing to prove that our cars are the best. This was his mantra and his philosophy," Lamborghini CEO Stephan Winkelmann tells Road & Track. But that was then. This is now, and as Winkelmann points out, "the brand is changing, but so are the people, the environment, the world."

"And now, with this LMDh [racing rule set], it was tempting for us—for technical reasons, for strategic ones," he says. "Because now we are in the midst of the transmission from ICE engines to hybrid cars. This is the reason it fits LMDh. We have the hybrid system. It's endurance racing, so it's testing materials. We also wanted to have global visibility, so we decided to go with both FIA WEC and IMSA, and we have the globe covered."

That led to SC63, a step into the sort of racing where wins go in history books rather than press releases. The car is sharp, bright green, and covered with hexagons. That means it fits perfectly into the modern Lamborghini design language, even before you get to the headlight and taillight pattern shared with Lamborghini's new Revuelto supercar. It is also the car that will show whether Lamborghini is capable of competing on this stage.

The SC63 is built to the LMDh regulation set, the one of two new top-class rule sets for IMSA and the FIA World Endurance Championship that requires teams to use a standard chassis. Lamborghini and Squadra Corse chose to partner with Ligier, becoming the first and only manufacturer to build a prototype around that specific tub. Unlike in the LMH rule set, which Ferrari and Toyota use, every other manufacturer here shares their chassis with at least one car: BMW's Dallara tub is used on a Cadillac, while Acura's ORECA tub is also at the heart of an Alpine. The Multimatic tub that makes the spine of the Porsche 963 was originally intended to be shared with a stillborn Audi prototype that was canceled only after a mostly completed car was rumored to be delivered to a partner team for testing.