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suspension and wheels before the fuel and water go
in, the oil is topped up, the electronics programmed
and the engine fired up. Five times a day you’ll hear a
6.5-litre V12 snarl into life. Nearby, at the end of the
Huracan’s line, the 5.2-litre V10s will do it 11 times.
Along the way, the black-gloved fitters screw and
bolt, run hands and eyes over joins and panels, and
check, tweak and adjust. For all that the factory is now
much bigger, more mechanised, far better-equipped
and making thousands more cars of immensely greater
complexity and quality, dedicated Emilian workers still
do most of the work by hand. Ranieri Niccoli, 48, the
former aeronautics engineer who is now Lamborghini’s
Industrial Director, says: “You have to love building
these cars. They are not easy to assemble. Just look
at the engine compartment: there is no spare space.
Inserting a powertrain as big as the Aventador’s
demands fantastic precision. That’s why we have
what some would consider a huge takt time. It lets
the assembly teams get it right, without feeling any
pressure other than pride in what they’re doing.”
Niccoli’s men and women wear smart black
Lamborghini-embossed polo shirts and matching gold-
trimmed black pants, in sharp contrast with the wear-
what-you-like days when there was a mix of jeans and
striped shirts, dust jackets and overalls. On the heads,
mohawks, fades, tapers and undercuts have replaced
Afros and mullets.
Over in Giuseppe Marescalchi’s engine department,
the amount of glistening alloy still takes your breath
away, just as it did when Bob Wallace first walked me
through in 1973. The milling machines are gone now,
and there’s no-one hunched over vices filing rough
edges off fresh castings. The V12’s components come
in ready-formed, checked for perfection, and the V10s
are trucked down from Audi’s plant in Hungary. As
ever, it’s a spell-binding place to linger and watch the
technicians bolting work-of-art crankshafts into the
glittering blocks, connecting up conrods, sliding in 12
pistons – each shiny as a jewel – and working through
the painstaking process of building a Lamborghini V12.
Each V12 will spend an hour and 40 minutes in the
dyno room revving through a computer-controlled test
pattern to make sure it can boast 544kW. That’s why,
when you see that massive powerplant being eased
into a chassis every 91 minutes, you’ll notice that its
exhausts are tinged brown by the heat of its initiation.If the factory, tools and processes at Sant’Agata are
much more sophisticated now, so are the cars. The
once-advanced pressed and drilled steel platform of
the Miura or the lattice-like welded spaceframe of the
Countach are worlds away from the Aventador’s top-to-
bottom carbonfibre monocoque, or the composite and
aluminium mix of the Huracan. Lamborghini is now
committed to being a leader in composites for cars.
“They’ve become part of our DNA,” says Luciano De
Oto, 46, head of Lamborghini’s Advanced Composite
Research Centre.
Sant’Agata’s composites prowess dates back to
1983, not long after McLaren introduced carbonfibre
to Formula 1. Then-boss Giulio Alfieri commissioned
a composites project to see how much weight might
be cut from a Countach. Fortune smiled: aeronautics
engineer Rosario Vizzini, who’d been at Boeing in
Seattle designing the 767’s carbonfibre vertical
stabilizers, had just returned to Italy. Lamborghini
snapped him up and got an injection of cutting
edge composites knowledge. Vizzini’s project was
the carbonfibre frame and body of the Countach
Evoluzione. It was 500kg lighter but too expensive to
build. Steadily, though, more and more composites
became part of Lamborghinis.
Now, through an eight-year-long partnership
with Boeing, joint research with Callaway (the golf
equipment maker), investment in a state-of-the-art
composites facility, and building up a team of more
than 60 experts in Italy and Seattle, Lamborghini is
confident it leads in composites in cars. “We are the
only car maker with complete knowledge, in-house,
of the entire span of composites from the start of an
idea to the delivery of a product, and right through to
repairs,” says De Oto, who started with the Minardi
F1 team then ran Ferrari’s F1 wind-tunnel tests before
joining Lamborghini in 2001.
Does Lamborghini’s commitment to composites
square with the Volkswagen Group’s desire for
increased platform sharing? “We work closely with
group marques but if a technical solution becomes
too much of a compromise it’s not a solution.
“You can do the best modular body in white to serve
all the platforms but in the end it’s a shitty body in
white for everybody. We tried to imagine the Aventador
in a platform project but it wasn’t possible. Porsche
wanted the fuel tank in the front. For us that’s a no-go.BACK IN 1963,
FERRUCCIO WAS
ATTRACTED TO
SANT’AGATA BY THE
TOWN’S COMMUNIST
COUNCIL WHO
PROMISED HIM A 19
PERCENT INTEREST
RATE ON PROFITS
WHEN DEPOSITED IN
THEIR BANK. THAT
AND ZERO TAX ON
PROFITS