For decades, Lamborghini has been all-in on all-wheel drive. Lamborghini CTO Rouven Mohr explains why that’s changing.
As the first all-wheel drive Lamborghini, the Diablo VT of 1993 was a groundbreaker. Not only did the addition of a viscous center coupling give the car a new name—VT stands for viscous traction—it fundamentally altered the driving experience. With four driven wheels, the Diablo VT made managing 492 hp in a mid-engine supercar easy. The Diablo’s successor, the Murcielago, was only available with four driven wheels, and rear-drive versions of Lamborghini’s entry-level Gallardo were only offered in limited numbers towards the end of that car’s life, and with lower horsepower.
Very recently, though, Lamborghini has started pushing rear-wheel drive to the forefront again. First with the wild and excellent Huracan STO, and again with the Tecnica, both of which share a 640-hp V-10 and only two driven wheels. “Fifty years ago, a car like this, you would be scared to drive at the upper limit,” says Rouven Mohr, Lamborghini’s new CTO, in an interview with Road & Track.
We haven’t driven the Tecnica yet, as it only just made its debut, but the STO is easy. And to Mohr’s point, the only 600-plus-hp mid-engine cars available fifty years ago made up the sharp end of Le Mans grids and Can-Am grids. A 917, these Lamborghinis are not, and that’s a good thing.
“We still say that if you have a really high-power car and you want to be fast in all conditions, four-wheel drive is the best for sure,” Mohr says. “If you want to have a track car to enjoy, also that feels extremely agile, one you can play with, rear-wheel drive has an advantage. Also from the weight perspective, rear-wheel drive has an advantage. Therefore, we decided to go with two-wheel drive in the STO, both for the technical reasons that I mentioned, and also because customers appreciate having rear-wheel drive cars.”
It’s a contrast to previous track-focused Lamborghinis like the Gallardo Superleggera and Huracan Performante. It reflects shifting tastes, and new technologies.
“Today with all the control systems, all the active systems, it’s easier really to give a car to the customer that is easy to handle and to control,” Mohr says. Fifteen-twenty years ago, it was not possible.”
For Lamborghini, one of the big steps forward came with its Lamborghini Dinamica Veicolo Integrata (LDVI) system, which debuted with the Huracan Evo. LDVI is, essentially, a central brain that talks to all of the car’s different systems—engine, gearbox, ABS, rear-wheel steering, differential, dampers, traction/stability control, and if applicable, all-wheel drive. The idea is that you can have a positive impact on vehicle handling by getting all these different parts working with each other. Instead of chomping on a brake to increase traction, you might want to decrease engine torque, or actuate the differential. The system can be almost proactive instead of reactive. Mohr cites an example where when the car thinks the driver is about to hit the brakes, the damper settings will change front-to-rear to promote a bit more weight transfer, and thus, sharper turn in.
This sort of thing isn’t totally new—GM and Ferrari have very successfully taken a similar approach to vehicle dynamics in recent years—but it’s allowed Lamborghini to take a big step forward.
Tire technology has also changed significantly, and that’s had a profound effect. Mohr brings up 2000s supercars, as an example. “The main target of these cars was to ensure mechanical traction,” he says. “Mechanical traction means really extremely wide tires, and suspension setups that are only traction oriented. But the disadvantage of this concept—and there were no other possibilities at this time—is that if you reach the limit, the car could be very snappy.”
Lamborghini obviously doesn’t want such wayward handling. Mohr says its cars are designed for easy control, the systems only intervening when necessary, and doing so in an almost imperceptible manner. Mohr also says the car needs to give the driver a lot of feel, so they have an idea of where the limits are. A big part of that is embracing body movements, even in a track-focused car like the STO. “This gives you more trust,” he says. “And you feel more when the limit is reached.”
Ultimately, this makes for a slower car. “If I’d develop a race car for a pro driver, the setup is completely different because the pro driver has one mission—fastest lap. He knows what he has to do. He knows the limit, and so on,” Mohr says. “Our mission is to have the customer enjoy the car.”
So even if an STO looks like a track refugee, and shares a lot of key components with a Huracan GT3, it’s not quite a race car for the road. Engineers have all sorts of tricks that can help a pro extract faster laps, but oftentimes, these tricks make what the car is doing beneath you less obvious. (For fun, read into anti-ackerman steering geometry.)
A lot of people call the Diablo one of the last truly old-school Lamborghinis. And that’s totally fair. It’s the last model the company developed before being taken over by Audi, a car that was by today’s standards, very analog. But with the VT, we see the direction Lamborghini was to take—give customers crazy designs and all the power in the world, but in a car that’s easy to manage.
In embracing rear-wheel drive in a bigger way, it might seem on the surface like Lamborghini is getting away from this, though really, it’s just that modern technology allows it to build safe, yet ultra-powerful rear-wheel drive cars.
Keyword: Why Lamborghini's Newest Track Cars Are Rear-Wheel Drive