Lamborghini Revuelto

The company so widely credited with establishing the mechanical template of the mid-engined supercar in the 1960s, Lamborghini has actually been tinkering and experimenting with that template ever since.

Now, in 2023, it has turned the page on another fascinating chapter of technically innovative, brilliantly extravagant vehicular savagery - as full of noise, excitement and drama as any that it has written before - with the Lamborghini Revuelto.

The revered Lamborghini Miura of 1966 needed more power and better cooling, so what was a transverse-mounted V12 engine eventually became a bigger, higher-output, longitudinally mounted one in the 1971 Countach - but also one with a gearbox fixed on the forward side of the engine, to the improvement of the car’s weight distribution.

When the Diablo VT arrived in 1993, that gearbox sprouted a centre differential, forward driveshafts and four-wheel drive – mechanically speaking, a pretty easy add-on.

But when the baby Lamborghini Gallardo came along in 2003, it adopted a gearbox fitted at the opposite end of the north-south engine and a driveshaft running forwards the full length of the wheelbase for what had become by that time “Lamborghini-typical supercar four-wheel drive”.

All the while, of course, the bigger Murciélago and then the Aventador stuck with Paolo Stanzani’s Countach-era forward-mounted gearbox, with a driveshaft running backwards to the rear axle.

Over the years, Lamborghini really has tried it every which way when it comes to the mechanical configuration of these sports cars. And now along comes the 21st century’s technical solution - and it might even be the cleverest and best yet.

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