You know the origin story of Lamborghini. Tractor builder Ferruccio Lamborghini wasn’t satisfied with the specifics of his harsh and fragile Ferrari road cars, so he began building his own grand tourers and eventually supercars. In stark contrast to Ferrari, who at the time were in the midst of a streak of seven Le Mans wins from eight attempts, Lamborghini chose not to race their cars. They were road cars and would prove themselves on the road.
The automotive landscape has changed a lot in the last 61 years. In one respect it is not. After a long hiatus competing only in the Formula 1 and GT categories, Ferrari returned to the top class at Le Mans last year and won again. This makes Ferrari once again Lamborghini’s target, where for the first time a serious top-class racing program takes place.
And that means sometime. The SC63 Le Mans hypercar is the culmination of a Squadra Corse racing program recently built from scratch – a program that, until the launch of this car, was focused on GT racing and the limited professional applications of cars built for those rule sets. Before Squadra Corse, Lamborghini’s entire racing history was one of odd one-offs that are remembered as mere trivia.
The best was a Formula One car built for a program called the Modena Team as part of a short-lived customer deal for the 1991 season only. That car never scored a single point, the team disappeared before 1992, and “Chrysler powered by Lamborghini” V-12 at its heart was more prominent with the time it spent in the back of the Minardi. This less than half-hearted short shot in F1 was the closest thing the brand ever had to a racing pedigree in its first 50 years.
Squadra Corse changed everything. First, it was a Gallardo spec racing program. Then came the Huracán GT3, a long-lasting machine that was refreshed twice. The ubiquity of the GT3 class meant that the Huracán brought Lamborghini into GT racing fields worldwide, allowing Lamborghini customers to compete against the best of Ferrari and Porsche in a wide variety of IMSA, DTM and SRO GT events. Wins and world championships proved the company could build a competitive car, and a growing roster of factory talent supporting the cars prepared Lamborghini well for what followed.
“Ferruccio Lamborghini, unlike other founders, always said that it was not necessary to compete to prove that our cars were the best. That was his mantra and his philosophy,” says Lamborghini CEO Stefan Winkelmann Road and track. But that was then. It is now, and as Winkelmann points out, “the brand is changing, but so are the people, the environment, the world.”
“And now, with this LMDh [racing rule set]it was tempting for us — for technical reasons, for strategic reasons,” he says. “Because now we’re in the midst of the transmission from ICE engines to hybrid cars. That’s why it fits the LMDh. We have a hybrid system. It’s a race for durability, so it tests the materials. We also wanted to have global visibility, so we decided to work with both the FIA WEC and IMSA, and we cover the whole world.”
This led to SC63, a stepping stone to the kind of racing where victories go into the history books, not press releases. The car is sharp, bright green and covered in hexagons. That means it fits perfectly into Lamborghini’s modern design language, even before you get to the headlight and taillight pattern shared with Lamborghini’s new Revuelto supercar. It’s also the car that will show if Lamborghini is capable of competing at this stage.
The SC63 is built to the LMDh ruleset, one of two new top-class rulesets for IMSA and the FIA World Endurance Championship, which requires teams to use a standard chassis. Lamborghini and Squadra Corse chose to partner with Ligier, becoming the first and only manufacturer to build a prototype around this specific tub. Unlike the LMH ruleset used by Ferrari and Toyota, every other manufacturer here shares its chassis with at least one car: BMW’s Dallara tub is used on the Cadillac, while Acura’s ORECA tub is also at the heart of the Alpine. The Multimatic tub that forms the backbone of the Porsche 963 was originally intended to be shared with a stillborn Audi prototype, which was only canceled after a rumor surfaced that a near-complete car would be delivered to a partner team for testing.
This means that Lamborghini invents its chassis along with everything else. The manufacturer is also one of only two brands to introduce its LMDh car a year after the ruleset was introduced, and a test crash last August delayed the program’s early development. The brand also only has one car in either championship, and that single car only competes in endurance races in America. With all these factors in mind, there’s no getting around it: Lamborghini is lagging behind. Brands like Porsche and Ferrari started testing their cars in 2022, nearly a year and a half behind Lamborghini.
The team knows this. At Sebring, brand CTO Rouven Mohr said Road and track that the team was chasing consistency in pace as much as full speed. The top classes in both IMSA and WEC racing apply performance balance, so all a Lamborghini has to do to have a chance of competing in a lap is get the car into the expected performance window. That consistency is what will really determine whether the car will be able to win against the best.
Building consistency is already a challenge, and it’s even greater when the team is currently racing just one car. Mohr says the team’s one-car entry in each series, borne entirely of the reality of getting the program up and running, is “one of the biggest drawbacks” the program faces.
“If you have three, four cars on the grid, you’re collecting data,” notes Mohr. “You can also use free practice to decide things much faster, you can have one set-up strategy on car A and one on car B, compare and make choices for the race.”
That’s an advantage every other GTP program has at Sebring, even the Cadillac team split between the operations of two factory partners. Mohr says this will be resolved when the team adds an extra entry next year, but until then it’s just something Lamborghini has to accept.
“It was a disadvantage, but there was no way out. You have to be realistic.”
Sebring was the car’s second race. Like his first at the World Endurance Championships in Qatar two weeks earlier, he was trouble free. This is a good thing – it means the brand has been able to gather vital data on how to improve both the overall pacing and the consistency of that pacing. It also means the car is surprisingly reliable, having completed 20 hours of racing without a notable breakdown. By comparison, only four of the nine LMDh-spec cars that debuted at the 2023 Daytona 24 Hours finished the race within 10 laps of the winner.
This is a serious achievement, especially given the harsh terrain at Sebring. Massive rectangular slabs of uneven concrete create a unique suspension test that requires engineers to figure out how to keep all four wheels on uneven high-speed corners and how to keep drivers holding the car together through a field of 60 cars. Every bump is a test of how well the car holds together and every lap is another chance for an LMP2 or GTD car to run off the track in front of the SC63.
The Sebring was a test, and it was one of the Lamborghinis driven by the Iron Lynx. Now that the car has proven reliable, the rest of the year will be about making it faster and more consistent. This includes an upcoming high-profile debut at Le Mans, where eyes will be on the bold green Lamborghini. Expectations for this first running of the 24-hour classic must be on hold, but if things go as they should, next year will be a different story. The team plans to expand to two cars, with a customer race also a possibility. If Iron Lynx and Squadra Corse can continue to improve the SC63, the expectation of victories will follow.
It brings stakes. For the first six decades, Lamborghini avoided the risks of showing up at the track and leaving without any trophies. But in the seventh there is a car designed to win the world’s biggest endurance races. For the program to succeed, the SC63 must eventually start earning.
