[Auto] Lamborghini Revuelto

[MehrezVM]

 

The company so widely credited with establishing the mechanical template of the mid-engined supercar in the 1960s, Lamborghini has actually been tinkering and experimenting with that template ever since.

 

Now, in 2023, it has turned the page on another fascinating chapter of technically innovative, brilliantly extravagant vehicular savagery - as full of noise, excitement and drama as any that it has written before - with the Lamborghini Revuelto.

 

The revered Lamborghini Miura of 1966 needed more power and better cooling, so what was a transverse-mounted V12 engine eventually became a bigger, higher-output, longitudinally mounted one in the 1971 Countach - but also one with a gearbox fixed on the forward side of the engine, to the improvement of the car’s weight distribution.

 

When the Diablo VT arrived in 1993, that gearbox sprouted a centre differential, forward driveshafts and four-wheel drive – mechanically speaking, a pretty easy add-on. 

 

But when the baby Lamborghini Gallardo came along in 2003, it adopted a gearbox fitted at the opposite end of the north-south engine and a driveshaft running forwards the full length of the wheelbase for what had become by that time “Lamborghini-typical supercar four-wheel drive”.

 

All the while, of course, the bigger Murciélago and then the Aventador stuck with Paolo Stanzani’s Countach-era forward-mounted gearbox, with a driveshaft running backwards to the rear axle.

 

Over the years, Lamborghini really has tried it every which way when it comes to the mechanical configuration of these sports cars. And now along comes the 21st century’s technical solution - and it might even be the cleverest and best yet

 

As the company’s first series-production plug-in hybrid, the Lamborghini Revuelto is a vital catalyst for its maker, beginning a ‘decarbonising’ electrification effort that will soon envelop both the Lamborghini Urus super-SUV and the replacement for the Lamborghini Huracán and allow the firm to demonstrate - with a series of EU lab test results, at least - that it’s doing its bit to cut emissions.

 

Yet the Revuelto is perhaps most interesting as a new answer to a question that every successive generation of Sant Agata’s designers and engineers must have pondered for almost six decades: how exactly do we get a big engine into the optimal place in a super sports car and have it drive all four wheels? Which compromise should we tolerate? A potentially problematic rearward weight distribution? A raised engine and associated centre of gravity?

 

In the Revuelto’s case, you need suffer neither - although you can’t escape the weight. Specifically, it’s the weight of no fewer than three electric motors and 3.8kWh of lithium ion battery cells, packaged though they may be in the lightest, stiffest, most carbonfibre-intensive mid-engined chassis that the company has ever designed. 

 

The Revuelto is about six inches longer than the Lamborghini Aventador that preceeded it, with an extra 79mm in the wheelbase. It’s an inch or two taller, too, and it weighs about 250kg more in running order, give or take. Not huge nor catastrophically heavy but definitely a stretch.

 

Yet the car still has a better power-to-weight ratio than any other series-production Lamborghini. That’s thanks in part to the ‘new’ L545 V12… with 6.5 litres of swept volume, a 60deg bank angle and identical cylinder bore and stroke dimensions to the old ‘L539’. Hmm.

 

Lamborghini technical boss Rouven Mohr actually admits that this is ostensibly the old mill with new heads and induction system and a lightened block modified in order that it could be swung through 180deg in the new car. But a higher compression ratio allows it to make 814bhp at 9250rpm and to keep on revving to 9500rpm – the kind of crank speeds that only the special-series Essenza SCV12 has hit previously.

 

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