@wheelsaustralia 97
HECONTADINOwho owned the fields
adjoining the Lamborghini factory must
feel like a lottery winner. His ship’s come
in. For decades, the factory that Ferruccio
Lamborghini built in 1963 was big enough to
knock out two or three hundred cars a year.
But since Audi bought Automobili Lamborghini
SpA in 1998 and poured in money and
resources, production has rocketed to last
year’s record 3457 cars. The Urus SUV coming
in 2018 should double that. And where, in the
grim days before Audi, there were
300 employees, now there are 1415,
and Urus will need another 500.
So the farmer over the back wall got lucky. To getthe space it now needs, Lamborghini bought his land.
Makes you wonder if he could mosey around to the
sales office and place an order for one of the cars.
These days, the plant at 12 via Modena, Sant’Agata
Bolognese, on the Emilian plain 17km east of Modena
and 24km north-west of Bologna, looks familiar albeit
bigger and smarter. The long Lamborghini script still
stretches along its roof. But the facade of the old offices
and main entrance fronting the production hall has
been freshened and abuts the new museum’s long, high,
glass gallery. In the 1970s, when I came here often to
drive the latest and greatest, the only old Lamborghinis
were customers’ cars in for service and forlorn-looking
prototypes and mules dumped out the back.
Where there was once a taciturn gateman, now
two smart, black-suited, multi-lingual young women
command the slick reception centre. They check your
ID (passports preferred), assign you a clip-on pass and
slap stickers over your phone’s lenses in case you’re
tempted to snap a new model as it burbles out of the
R&D workshops. It doesn’t seem long ago that the
prototype Countach – now a star in the museum – was
easing from the same workshops, with legendary Kiwi
test driver Bob Wallace at the wheel.
Back then, you might have encountered a couple of
suppliers coming and going, or the odd owner bringing a
car in for attention. Nowadays, scores of visitors – 65,000
a year – mill about outside the museum, waiting to ogle
five decades of Lamborghinis and tour the factory.
When their guide – like the impressively
knowledgeable Maria Federica Fazzini – leads them
through to the assembly lines, in the original sawtooth-
roofed hall just behind the museum, they may be
surprised by the serenity. If they’ve seen plants
building thousands of cars a day, the Lamborghini
factory will seem like a cathedral of calm. The clue is in
the large digital clocks suspended above the production
lines. The Aventador’s counts down from 91 minutes.
That’s the ‘takt time’ – to use the German term now
embedded at Sant’Agata – governing how long each
body, steadily becoming a car, spends at each assembly
station. Anyone on the line can see how long they have
before the line moves on. It’s a deliberately relaxed
duration that lets the 12 teams work unhurriedly as
they wiggle into place the plethora of components.
They start with the wiring harness and finish with the
LAMBORGHINI’S KIWI TEST DRIVER
BOB WALLACE WITH COUNTACH NO.1
AND (BELOW) IN THE ENGINE ROOM
WITH AUTHOR NICHOLS IN 1973