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Lamborghini Veneno supercar celebrates the bull's 50th birthday

While yesterday's and today's leaks of the 2013 Lamborghini Veneno took some of the mystery out of this 50th-anniversary hypercar, the exotic, street-legal racecar is no less exciting. Now with the official announcement, we get more details about what three lucky people on Earth will get to experience.
The Veneno is named after one of the fastest and strongest fighting bulls ever.
As we suspected, the Veneno name follows the Lamborghini tradition of naming its cars after famous fighting bulls, and this new Aventador-based hypercar is named after one of the fastest and strongest fighting bulls ever, a bull that gained recognition back in 1914 for killing a matador. To match its name, the Veneno gets its strength from Lamborghini's 6.5-liter V12 producing 750 horsepower and tops out at 220 miles per hour.

Lamborghini Murcielago SV reverse-engineered by a team from Iran

Iranian engineers successfully made themselves a copycat Lamborghini Murcielago SV. In looks, if not in performance, that is. The most interesting aspect behind the project is that they say it was created using Lamborghini's original data. They took a serious left turn when it came to the powertrain though, because sitting behind the driver is a 3.8-liter Hyundai V6. Not quite the 6.5-liter V12 monster in the actual Murcielago SV. Massoud Moradi, the director of the project, thinks that nobody would be able to tell the difference between this car and Lamborghini's from an appearance standpoint. "All parts of the body, inside the car and precise mechanics of the car are manufactured and mounted based on the original ... Murcielago platform. Its chassis is also one and one with the original," Massoud says. One of the reasons Massoud and his team embarked on this project was to learn how Lamborghini made its supercars. They made their replica after taking apart a real Murcielago and designing new parts based on the original Lamborghini bits. The project to make this thing started four years ago, and the team didn't spend "any time planning or testing the car." Now that's a clear indication you probably don't want to drive this thing. Just because it's designed to be a copy of the Murcielago doesn't mean it's going to perform anything like it on the road. This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. We'll admit the exterior design is pretty spot-on compared to the actual Murcielago SV, as you can see in the video above (which comes from RT, a network funded by the Russian government). Everything apparently lines up to the original dimensionally, and it uses a bunch of carbon fiber and composite components throughout. Moradi claims a top speed of at least 174 miles per hour — there's no word on what, if any, modifications have been done to the Hyundai engine and transmission to achieve such a speed. So count us skeptical for the time being. The Iranian team wants to make more of them too. Moradi suggested that the small company could make 50-100 units per year if they were to go into production. He'd like future iterations of the car to have larger V8 and even V10 engines, too. Might we suggest some testing first? And what does Lamborghini think of this whole operation? These guys purposefully copied one of Lamborghini's designs with an intent to eventually make money off of it.

Lamborghini NA V12 swan song a track-only 830-hp Aventador SVR?

According to a poster on a McLaren Life forum and picked up by The Supercar Blog, Lamborghini is preparing a small-batch, track-only model to begin deliveries around 2021. At the end of last month, user Champagne612 wrote that he (or she) was "Going to spec next week and test drive the SVR V12 track version of AV." In the words of Champagne612, this Aventador SVR is the last hurrah for Lamborghini's naturally aspirated 6.5-liter V12, a flourish before hybridization becomes necessary on the brand's iconic powerplant. Supposedly, only 40 SVRs will be made, each one producing 830 atmospheric horsepower. That would give the SVR 60 more horses than the road-legal SVJ. Lamborghini's only made two other SVR models. In 1968, there was the one-of-one Miura Jota SVR, a customer-request Lamborghini brewed with a mix of outsourced parts. More relevant to this latest car, in 1996 Lamborghini built 31 examples of the Diablo SV-R — based on the Diablo SV — to form a one-make race series. It's not clear if the coming SVR will be just a customer track-day car, a la the new Porsche 911 GT2 RS-based 935, or if Lamborghini has larger plans, a la the Ferrari FXX-K program. The Sant' Agata brand has leaned even more into the customer racing vibe of late, with a Urus one-make series planned, and the customer-request, road-legal Aventador-based SC18 Alston unveiled last year (pictured). Based on that, there's chatter that an Aventador SVR could be a feint at the so-called hypercar class opening next year in the World Endurance Championship. The connection seems more than tenuous, but it's not impossible. Lamborghini CEO Stefano Domenicali said at the Goodwood Festival of Speed that the carmaker was perusing the hypercar regulations taking effect in 2020 until about 2025, and told Autocar that the SC18 Alston "shows that we have internal capabilities for such a [Le Mans] project." Those rules require a minimum weight of 1,100 kilograms, maximum combined output of 750 hp — an optional hybrid system can contribute no more than 270 hp — and a minimum of 20 production versions built over two years. Save for the fact that committed entries from Aston Martin and Toyota are much more slippery than any Lamborghini, the rules on paper put an Aventador-based model firmly in the mix, and unresolved regulations limiting downforce and mandating a minimum drag figure could inch an Italian competitor closer to the mark.