“The business has certainly come back faster than we anticipated.” So says Lamborghini chairman and CEO Stephan Winkelmann, with a smile painted across his chiselled jaw, in explanation of the remarkable, trend-bucking sales growth of his employer.
The company posted its strongest annual sales volumes on record in 2021 when most other car makers were experiencing starkly different fortunes, and it has just introduced a new version of its core V10 sports car called the Lamborghini Huracan Tecnica.
While no Lamborghini executive seems willing to risk saying it out loud, in 2022 the company is on course to break through the 10,000-unit watershed. If it does, its business will have grown from roughly a third of the size of long-time rival Ferrari’s to be almost a match for it, in volume terms at least, in less than a decade. It’s quite the coup - and there’s that much-teased, all-electric, fourth Lamborghini showroom model still to come, let’s not forget.
Ought we perhaps to remember, though, when ex-Ferrari boss Luca di Montezemolo warned against the risks of growing beyond a sustainable business base for supercar makers, because doing so might dilute exclusivity and bring about painful cuts during economically tough times? It wasn’t that long ago; and times seem pretty tough right now for the vast majority of us, don’t they? Well, evidently the global rich didn’t get the memo.
Product-wise, many would quite rightly point to the Lamborghini Urus SUV as the driving force behind the company’s late commercial rise, but the truth is that the Huracan super-sports car has been pulling its weight, and then some. The company’s mid-engined models are doing twice the volume today that they were five years ago. In the year of the headline hybridisation of key rivals, this mid-engined V10 exotic may feel more and more like some throwback misfit with every passing month, and it’s certainly in its dotage. But the funny thing is, Lamborghini just keeps selling ’em - perhaps because the cars themselves just keep getting better.
The Huracán Performante of 2017 was brilliant. Both the facelifted Huracan Evo RWD and the Huracan STO that have since followed it have been special cars also. And now, with less than two years of life left in the car, comes what will be the penultimate version, before it too regenerates and switches to plug-in hybrid power: the Huracan Tecnica.
This new mid-level Huracán derivative is intended to plug the gap between the regular Evo version of the car and the top-level STO hardcore special, the latter having been a car that the factory launched only tentatively, unsure as to whether customers would be willing to spend what was nearly Aventador money on a Huracán (guess what, reader: they have been). But the Tecnica’s price is much closer to heartland Huracán territory: it is pitched just above £200,000 in the UK, but is still cheaper than the entry sticker price of a McLaren 720S, and is considerably cheaper than a Ferrari 296 GTB.
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