DESERT SHIELD

Lamborghini bids farewell to the Huracán by unleashing the most extreme version of all

- JAMES TAYLOR

'PLAY IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF RESEARCH,' said Albert Einstein (always good for a quote, that man). This car was born through play.

Back in 2017, when Lamborghini was putting the finishing touches to the Urus SUV, its senior engineers were charging around the Strada Bianca dirt track at the Nardo development ground in southern Italy. While testing the Urus, we were in love with the driving on this course,' grins Lamborghini's likeably enthusiastic chief technical officer, Rouven Mohr. 'We thought: "Wouldn't it be amazing to drive on this course in our super sports cars?"""

Head of design Mitja Borkert takes up the story. 'We were so excited by the idea, I called my guys and said: "We need to start sketching." We made a third-scale design model, Rouven liked it a lot and I said to him: "Why don't we build a demonstrator?" He said: "Yeah! We have an old Huracán durability development car-free." So I set about designing the cladding and so on...' 

Everybody in Lamborghini's inner circle who drove the demonstrator was captivated by it; even those initially sceptical about whether or not there might be a market for such a car. When Stephan Winkelmann returned to Lamborghini as CEO in 2020, during an epic design meeting in which both the Revuelto hybrid and modern-day Countach were approved, a production version got the green light. When we showed him the Sterrato,' Borkert recalls, he said: "That's what we need to do. We should always be different."