Pub quiz whiz, car fan or just a general know-it-all? You might get a kick out of our Quick Car Pub Facts series.
This time we’ve got a rapid-fire run down of some of the wackiest facts about Lamborghini's famous hypercars to either amaze or annoy your mates down the boozer with.
Ferruccio Lamborghini was the original Iron Man
Remember how Tony Stark crafted his first Iron Man suit out of spare bits and bobs when he was trapped in that terrorist-held cave? Yeah, it was pretty much the same thing for Lamborghini founder Ferruccio Lamborghini in real life.
During the Second World War, Lamborghini found himself stationed on the Greek island of Rhodes as a vehicle maintenance supervisor. The war had made spare parts hard to come by, and so Lamborghini gained a reputation for keeping military trucks running using cobbled together scraps.
You can buy a Lamborghini tractor
Believe it or not, the first Lamborghinis weren’t cars at all, but tractors. Thanks to his wartime experience, Lamborghini turned his talents towards designing agricultural machines out of spare parts.
Today, Lamborghini the carmaker and Lamborghini Trattori are separate businesses, but the tractors are still designed by the company. There were even racing models sold during the mid-1970s.
Lamborghini started making cars because he hated Ferrari
Enzo Ferrari had a bit of a reputation for being a right crotchety old git and then having that come around and bite him later on, most famously with the Ford GT’s iconic Le Mans victory, but also with Lamborghini.
With the spoils of his tractor company, Ferruccio bought himself a Ferrari 250GT, which he took into Ferrari’s Maranello factory for inspection after he realised the clutch was the same as those he used in his tractors.
After asking Enzo for a replacement part, Enzo replied: “You're just a silly tractor manufacturer, how could you possibly know anything about sports cars?”. To spite him, Ferruccio went on to found the world second most famous supercar company.
The first Lamborghini car didn’t have an engine
The very first Lamborghini was the 350 GTV, a car which would go on to almost single-handedly create the supercar genre, but upon its official unveiling at the Turin Auto Show it didn’t even have an engine.
Instead, Lamborghini filled the engine bay with a bunch of bricks and kept the bonnet shut the entire time so nobody would know any different.
Countach is a swear word
From Miura, to Murcielago and Veneno, Lamborghini has a history of naming its cars after savage fighting bulls, but one of the company’s most famous cars, the Countach, was instead named after a swear word.
In the Piedmontese language, “countach!” is roughly equivalent to “bloody hell!” or a more Sid James-y “cor blimey!”. Reportedly, the name was chosen after designer Giuseppe Bertone first saw the finished prototype in his studio and exclaimed loudly: "Countach!"
Lamborghini built the first Dodge Viper engine
The first Dodge Viper was developed in the late 1980s when Lamborghini was currently owned by Chrysler. Rather than dropping one of Dodge’s motors into the car, Chrysler got Lamborghini to cast a special aluminium engine especially for the prototype.
It didn’t make it to production, of course, but it does mean that somewhere deep in Dodge’s vaults in Detroit there lies a Viper powered by a Lamborghini engine.
