Lambo One-Offs

At the Geneva motor show last year, Ferrari, the most magnetic and exciting car brand in all the world, revealed its most powerful road car ever. And yet, doubtless to Maranello’s boiling chagrin, the petrol-smelling internet was ambushed by a rival. Lamborghini unwrapped the Veneno, and that’s where everyone clicked. This, after all, was news: unlike the LaFerrari, no one knew it was coming. And it looked absolutely barking mad. The LaFerrari was unattainable, limited to 499 copies
at R14 million each. But Lamborghini trumped even that: more exclusivity, more money. Just three Venenos would be made, at more than twice the Ferrari’s sticke.

Ferrari’s frustration must have been multiplied by the fact it’d tried so hard. Immense engineering, design and marketing effort was spent launching a supercar that smashed boundaries all over the map. In contrast, the Lambo was a limited gesture, brilliantly calculated to get maximum publicity for minimum effort. As brand building, it was genius. As a car, less so.

The Veneno’s extraordinary shape was claimed to be all about aerodynamics. The whole nose was supposed to give downforce and channel air cleanly to the rear wing. The fin would give downforce at high oversteer angles. Yeah, right. It might have looked like the contents of Gordon Ramsay’s knife drawer in free fall, but underneath, it was basically an Aventador. Now, is the standard Aventador’s aero package so shoddy that it needs to be reworked this dramatically? Course not. Lamborghini talked vaguely about it being a “racing prototype”, but there were no drag or lift figures, no concrete claims about lap-time improvements. That suspicion was deepened a few months later when Lambo launched the Veneno roadster, a car whose open-cockpit turbulence would certainly upset those claimed immaculate airflows, and which weighed 40kg more than the Veneno coupé so was obviously not as obsessed with dynamics as its maker’s flimflam would have it.

No, the Veneno was primarily about commerce, not about the wind tunnel. It was about selling a few quickly developed cars to special clients at sky-high prices while at the same time brilliantly buffing up the company’s outlaw brand. Lamborghini has form here, having built the sequence of kapow limited editions you see on these pages. The Veneno re-establishes a key part of the Lamborghini mythology in the decade from the mid-Sixties. The Miura, Countach and Silhouette weren’t about racing or science. They were about histrionics and theatre, about making us all go weak at the knees. Lamborghini’s supercars freely acknowledge what we all secretly know: we love supercars because they put drama above lap times, art above science.

The Veneno was named after a bull who killed, 100 years ago, one of the most famous fighters in Andalusia. Nice. It, like the firm’s other limited editions, is a two-finger salute, a boast in carbon fibre that Lamborghini can build cars more outlandish than any other company would dare. But behind that, nowadays, is a calculating motivation not present in the Seventies. These mad editions earn Lambo the permission to launch the relatively house-trained Huracán and fend off any moans that the raging bull has been softened and castrated.

And there’s revenue in these editions. The first of them, the Reventón, was a coach-built Murciélago. It came in a limited number of 20, at a shade under R14m each. By leaving the mechanical package basically untouched, Lambo could avoid a lot of the expensive R&D process. But the Reventón did bring a breath of fresh air to Lambo’s design, allowing then design chief Manfred Fitzgerald to develop themes that would emerge in the Aventador. It also previewed TFT-screen instruments. A
run of 20 Roadster versions followed. I remember seeing one sat alongside a Veyron roadster at a motor show. The Lambo, nearly as expensive, looked shoddily finished to an embarrassing degree. But rarity and drama were on its side.

The Aventador J was the first spin-off from the new-gen V12. It was a one-off. Lambo’s management at the time was having a disagreement with the VW Group, having been banned from making public some future plans. So instead they designed, built and sold the Aventador J in six weeks flat before its unveiling.

The Sesto Elemento was so much more. A true and extreme research prototype to demonstrate with jolting commitment the spiralling benefits of light weight (under 1000kg) through advanced materials and lovingly brutal design discipline. Unlike the other, more superficial, of Lambo’s side projects, it was never supposed to be sold. But when a clamour pressed money into Lamborghini’s hands, the firm relented and built 20. Tragedy is, it’s too radical to be road-registered.

The Sesto Elemento is, as a spur for the advancement of supercars, by far the most vibrant of Lamborghini’s limited-run machines, and yet I suspect it may not be the one that will have most long-term monetary value. Because there are 20 Sesto Elementos. The single-seat Egoista, revealed at the firm’s half-centenary dinner before a hyper-excited band of owners, must be the holy grail. There is only one, and it’s “not for sale”, remaining on show in the foyer at the factory. There’s nothing more collectable than the utterly unobtainable.

More and more, what a certain breed of high-end car buyers wants is a car that no one else has. This is why limited editions hold such value, and Lamborghini has tapped the trend brilliantly. Of course, these days every two-bit supercar maker in a shed is frantically pushing the exclusivity button. They turn up at motor shows with their underdeveloped 600kW sledges, accepting deposits “in strictly limited numbers”.

I used to laugh at these chancers, because I figured the main thing anyone might want in an ultra-powerful car would be proper development by a big and experienced team, as found in the proper supercar makers. But these days there exists a cohort of people so keen to be seen in a car denied to their equally minted mates that the usual rules no longer apply. They’ll happily trade fully baked development and heritage for a limited-edition plaque and a big jewel on the dash. The expression of individuality trumps down-the-road capability.

Lambo’s limited editions posit something extra. They meld a 24-carat brand and proper supercar engineering with the draw of exclusivity. There might have been something bogus about the strutting aero stylings of the Veneno, but at least a fully engineered and indeed lightened and power-boosted Aventador lurked within. Even the limited Lamborghinis are real Lamborghinis. And in the case of the Sesto Elemento, they’re a whole lot more by being literally a whole lot less.