CLASSIC HEART

John Mayhead visits Lamborghini's Polo Storico division, as it celebrates its tenth anniversary

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WALTER RENALDO SMILES at me, his round glasses on his round face doing little to disguise the physical strength of this 74-year-old, a characteristic that is still very evident in his thick forearms that rest on the desk. ‘I was always strong,’ he tells me proudly. ‘My first job was to deliver crankshafts — sometimes 200 per day - and they are 35kg each.’

When Walter joined Automobili Lamborghini in 1966, the company was just three years old and based, as it still is, at Sant’Agata Bolognese. Ferruccio Lamborghini chose the site for two reasons: not only was it a deprived area that he hoped to improve with the injection of jobs that the company would bring, but it was also a snub to Enzo Ferrari, just 20km up the road in Maranello. And, as Walter tells me, whereas Enzo was famously aloof, Ferruccio was the opposite. ‘He was always polite and caring, a real gentleman,’ he says. ‘Even when times were hard, the workers were always paid.

Times have indeed been hard at Lamborghini. Having become bankrupt in 1978, it passed through the ownership of French brothers Patrick and Jean Claude Mimran, then Chrysler, which sold it on in 1994 to Megatech, a joint venture between the Malaysian investment group Mycom Setdco and V’Power of Indonesia. Four years later, it was sold to Volkswagen Group, which placed it under the control of Audi. Since then the brand has been transformed, with more than 10,000 cars produced in 2024, combining handbuilt attention to detail with modern production facilities that hint at the German owner. To put the figure in context, that’s roughly the same quantity of Lamborghinis that were built in total from the creation of the company up to the end of Diablo production in 2001.