April 28 marks the 107th anniversary of the birth of Ferruccio Lamborghini, who created the automotive brand bearing his last name. He was born on April 28, 1916, in Renazzo, a village in the municipality of Santo, in the province of Ferrara.
He was the eldest son of Antonio and Evelina Lamborghini, a family of farmers, and so it seemed that his fate was written, as tradition dictated that the eldest son should inherit the family farm. However, young Ferruccio was more attracted to mechanics than to the land, and from a very early age he preferred to spend his afternoons in the workshop on the farm.
Ferruccio was concise, firm and very sure of his ideas. While still a child, he managed to get hired in the best mechanical workshop in Bologna, where he discovered all the secrets of this profession.
At the start of World War II, Ferruccio, already an experienced and highly regarded mechanic, was drafted into the army and assigned to the 50th Mixed Maneuver Division in Rhodes, Greece, responsible for all vehicles on the island. Was in charge of maintenance. , including tractors used to pull planes and diesel trucks.
Ferruccio successfully repaired vehicles for Italians, Germans and British. It was also in Rhodes at the end of the war where he opened his first company, a small mechanical workshop.
In 1946, he returned to Italy and, taking advantage of some incentives to support the economic recovery, opened a workshop in Cento, where he repaired vehicles. While working in the workshop and seeing the crisis in local agriculture, he was reminded of the tractors he had repaired in Rhodes, and thus began the idea of making economical agricultural tractors using components from old military vehicles.
The first to be converted was a Morris truck, to which Ferruccio, in addition to installing major modifications, fitted a fuel vaporizer invented by himself. It was presented on February 3, 1948, during the Santo patron saint festival, and eleven units were sold.
It was this success that inspired Ferruccio to become an entrepreneur. To buy the lot 1,000 Morris engines, he had to go into debt with the bank and mortgage everything he owned, including the family farm, with his father’s approval.
In the early sixties, when he was already one of Italy’s most important industrialists, a millionaire and in full swing with his company, Ferruccio drove vehicles for the most prestigious brands such as Jaguar, Ferrari, Aston Martin and Maserati .
He loved speed and had even competed as a pilot in the legendary Mille Miglia race years earlier. But those glitzy cars, the best of their time and which could satisfy any millionaire’s whims, could not fully satisfy his demanding and perfectionist personality.
After several problems with the clutch on his Ferrari250 GTB, he found that it was the same one he used on his tractors. In Ferruccio’s own words: “It was the Ferrari cars that caused problems for me. One day, fed up with sending them to the workshop, I called Enzo to tell him that his cars were pure garbage and he replied that a tractor manufacturer could not understand his cars”.
After a heated conversation, Ferruccio sets out to prove that he can build a better V12-powered sports car than his rival. And not only because he allocated an impressive investment to build one of the most modern car factories in Europe in Santa Agata, near Modena.
To achieve his goals, he put together a team of young engineers, including the creator of the Ferrari 250 GTO, Dallara, Bizzarini, who had already begun to prove his worth at Maserati, and the then promising Stanzani, a university dropout. signed after. of Bologna.
Lamborghini himself joined them and did not hesitate to be personally involved in the development of the project, which culminated in the 1964 Lamborghini 350 GT, which was presented at the Turin Motor Show. There also arose the need to find a suitable logo that would depict them. Until then, tractors manufactured under the Lamborghini name had a very simple silver-coloured insignia: a triangle with the letters FLC (Ferruccio Lamborghini Cento).
Ferruccio approached Paolo Lambaldi, a well-known local graphic designer, who asked him what personal characteristics he possessed. “I am tough, strong and stubborn like a bull”, was Ferruccio’s response. In this way, in conjunction with their zodiac signs, the current Automobili Lamborghini logo that the whole world knows was born.
The hallmarks of innovation and technical curiosity remain the hallmarks of Ferruccio Lamborghini and sometimes of the world’s best engineers who surrounded him. In 1966 the Miura rewrote sports car history.
Created as a prototype in 1971, the Countach was so revolutionary that it was still trendy in 1990 when, after 17 years of production and 1,999 units built, it was replaced by the Diablo, Lamborghini’s first all-wheel drive supercar I went. On April 24, 1987, Chrysler Corporation acquired Nuova Automobili Ferruccio Lamborghini SpA for $25 million, although the Italian firm was never profitable for Chrysler, who ended up selling it in 1994.
Ferruccio Lamborghini died on February 20, 1993 at the age of 76. After his death, Lamborghini was purchased by Volkswagen and the firm remains one of the most important assets in iconic sports cars. How could it be otherwise, Lamborghini will launch a trio of 60th anniversary special editions, based on the Huracan STO, Technica and Evo Spyder, each limited to 60 units.
