You know things never change, do they?
What do carmakers do when their customers feel betrayed? Betray them again. Buyers know there is nothing much they can do, so they going on buying and go on getting done over.
But occasionally they pick the wrong person.
Tractor maker Ferruccio Lamborghini had a problem with the clutch in his Ferrari 250 GT. His factory was near Ferrari’s so he popped around to see Enzo and have a yarn about the issue. Enzo basically told him to shoot through so Ferruccio decided to build his own V12 Ferrari but call it a Lamborghini. He thought about naming it a Ferruccio but figured that most high-end buyers would love a supercar named after a piece of farm machinery. The first non-tractor Lambo turned up at the 1963 Turin Auto Show. Next year Ferruccio took 130 sales away from Ferrari. With tractor and supercar sales booming in 1965 Ferruccio created a new car — the Lamborghini Miura. The Miura was the fastest production car in the world. It was good for 280km/h and 0 to 100km/h in 6.7 seconds. The Miura made Lamborghini. Ferrari and Maserati lost 375 sales to the tractor man. And it helped that Miura was a famous breed of large and difficult fighting bulls.
Ferruccio did it again six years later with the LP4500 Countach. This was a car built out of aircraft aluminium over a tubular space frame with a huge V12 sitting behind the driver. Countach is an Italian expression that basically means “Holy shit!” And that’s what it did to the motoring world. The thing was undriveable so they put the LP400 into production. Naturally the first one was bought by an Australian. You can have one today for about $2 million.
Anyway in 1974, the tractor business went south, the unions wanted more of the action and in 1978 Lamborghini went belly up. From then on there were very few people who didn’t own the company for a few years until VW bought it in 1998.
So why am I telling you all this?
Well soon I will be in Belgium, the country that gave the world small, flat, rainy and boring, for the Bonhams Grand Prix sale. On the blocks is a wonderful, one of 120, V12 Lambo 350 GT coupe. Car & Driver said: “It’s much less demanding to drive than a Ferrari and, what’s more, it seems to steer, stop, go and corner just about as well as our last Ferrari test car (275 GTS) but it’s so smooth and so quiet!”
Yours for a bit over a mill.
But wait there’s more. Here’s a bet worth taking. If Don Trump becomes boss of the free world imagine what his 1997 Lambo Diabolo will be worth. With just 20,000km, this 366 kW Le Mans blue beast can be yours for around $600,000. Now this is double the normal price but sitting on the same seat the Trumpster once graced must be worth $300,000 any day. And Lamborghini will be joining Ferrari, Audi and Bentley next year for the 12 hours of Bathurst. The factory cannot confirm whether Don will be out for the race saying that it will have to wait until the results of another race on November 8.
Talking of 12-hour races, TheWeekend Australian racing team is all set for a return to the 24 Hours of LeMons at Wakefield Park on October 28. Top motorsport coach Phil Alexander tells me he has had a number of drivers under his wing for secret training. Phil is no slouch, having knocked off 92 races including some Bathurst podiums and Australian Class Championships. Speaking from his RaceAway office at Wakefield Park, Phil said one of his secret training group looked suspiciously like a motoring writer whose son beat his lap times by 10 seconds last year.
And finally we had readers concerned about the conduct of the August meeting of the WA State Council of CAMS. Apparently the chairman, Nick Rahimtulla, tabled a discussion paper to extend the length of the terms for the chair and his deputy from one year to three years. There were objections on the floor about this and how the chairman was trying to go about it. Then when the minutes of the meeting were circulated, members were told it was going to a vote — problem was that it was never put up as a motion.
Not only that, but I’ve heard (among other things) that clubs without voting rights were included in the pool of eligible voters, and that all clubs — even those without voting rights — who abstained from voting were included in the yes pile of the vote.
Of course these are technicalities, but it left some members with a sour taste in their mouths. We put all this to Nick and he said that the allegations were “an attempt to discredit both myself and the CAMS organisation for some personal satisfaction”. This is a shortened version of the original article. To read the rest go to:http://www.theaustralian.com.au/life/motoring/ferraris-clutch-led-ferruccio-lamborghini-to-design-glory/news-story/77d0c54ec9ed62a67b7f6886fc8e9a0c
