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We visit the Lamborghini Museum at company HQ in Sant'Agata

Last week, Lamborghini invited us to stop by its Sant'Agata Bolognese headquarters to have a look around the factory and pick up a few technical tidbits about its new Huracán LP 610-4. It won't surprise you to learn this, but Lambo's foyer is pretty rad.
Rather than front its offices and factory with a gift shop and a reception desk, Lamborghini puts its amazing heritage on full display by offering up the corporate museum as a first impression to visitors. We had coffee in the morning and lunch after the press conference in this space, with stunning Italian concept cars and production models serving as an impressive backdrop to it all. Not wanting to miss the opportunity to share the Lamborghini collection with exotic-car crazed Autoblog readers (you know who you are), we did our best to capture everything we saw in the gallery here.
With some variation, the museum's two floors are separated by vintage: older models downstairs and newer up. When you walk through the front door, you're flanked by two of the coolest Lamborghinis in the marque's impressive history: a 350 GT to the left and a perfectly green Countach LP 400 on the right. Perhaps our favorite car in the whole joint, the Countach's Bertone body is still almost impossible to believe. Up close, we're reminded how design-driven this car is; the seats are so far inboard from the scissor doors that it's difficult to imagine that engineers ever agreed that the shape was a feasible one for production or actual driving.

2015 Lamborghini Huracan LP 620-2 Super Trofeo [w/video]

Pull a run-of-the-mill Lamborghini Huracan LP 610-4 off the Sant'Agata Bolognese assembly line, and you'll get a fearsome piece of machinery that can hit 60 miles per hour in as little as 2.5 seconds and reach a terminal velocity in excess of 200 mph. The stats are stunning, but the boys at Lamborghini want more – not just numerically, but more in the greater glory of an all-encompassing, brand-aggrandizing, Ferrari kind of way. Why compare the Raging Bull with the Prancing Horse in particular? Surely, any self-respecting gearhead knows that the two brands exude subtly different swaggers. But the gap goes well beyond the superficial: while Ferrari (not to mention competitors like McLaren and Porsche) has nurtured an enviable racing history from LeMans to Monaco, Lamborghini's history on the track is a bit scarcer. The Volkswagen Group recently thrust Bentley back into competition to reinvigorate the brand's past glories, and the next VW brand to win the racing lottery is Lamborghini. Behold: the Lamborghini Huracan LP 620-2 Super Trofeo. Born To Race While Lamborghini claims a long history of wedge-shaped exotica, the Huracan was the first production car in the brand's half-century history to be engineered from scratch with the racetrack in mind. As such, the street car's screaming, naturally-aspirated V10 and 3,135-pound curb weight are mere starting points for Dallara Automobili, the firm tasked with developing the racecar in conjunction with Lamborghini. For starters, the standard Huracan is alleviated of many of its pedestrian trappings like airbags, sound systems, and swanky power-operated leather seats. By jettisoning the unnecessary, the Super Trofeo manages to slim down nearly 330 pounds, to around 2,800 pounds. Don't let the mere 10 (metric) horsepower jump fool you: the LP 620-2's Motec engine management system not only adds data acquisition capabilities (which work alongside an eight-setting traction control system and a 12-setting Bosch ABS setup), it completely changes the power delivery characteristics of that 5.2-liter V10. More on that later. A good chunk of that weight loss comes from the removal of the entire front end of the drivetrain, which transforms this Huracan from an all-wheel-drive animal to a rear-drive beast.

Lamborghini and Bentley rack up record sales in 2022

Sister companies Lamborghini and Bentley independently announced that they set a sales record in 2022. Both firms posted a big increase in deliveries, and their announcement comes shortly after Bugatti and Rolls-Royce released their own record-breaking 2022 sales figures. Lamborghini delivered 9,233 cars in 2022, an increase of 10% over 2021 (which was a record year as well). Its best-selling model is the Urus, which accounted for 5,367 deliveries (a 7% increase over 2022). That's not surprising; SUVs sell well. What's rather stunning is that Huracan deliveries soared by 20% to 3,113 examples in 2022. Finally, Lamborghini delivered the last 753 examples of the Aventador. Geographically, the United States remains Lamborghini's biggest market; the company delivered 2,721 cars there in 2022 (an increase of 10% over 2021). China takes second place with 1,018 deliveries (up 9%) followed by Germany (808 cars; up 14%), the United Kingdom (650 cars; up by 15%), and Japan (546 cars; up 22%). All told, deliveries in the EMEA region(Europe, Middle East and Africa) jumped by 7% to 3,484 cars. The company's outlook for 2023 is bright. It will notably unveil the Aventador's hotly-anticipated successor, and the yet-unnamed model will stand out as its first series-produced hybrid model. Its historic factory in Sant'Agata Bolognese, Italy, will keep busy as well. "We now have the opportunity to focus on our next objectives also thanks to an 18-month waiting list," said company boss Stephan Winkelmann. While it's too early to tell if 2023 will be another record year for Lamborghini, executives stress that they want to keep the company's growth in check. The aim isn't to rival, say, BMW in terms of volume. "The idea will always be to have one car less than demand," Andrea Baldi, the head of the Americas region for Lamborghini, told Autoblog in 2022. "We will never become unexclusive. That is a promise." Bentley is celebrating for many of the same reasons: It sold 15,174 cars in 2022, an increase of 4% over 2021 and its first annual result above the 15,000-unit mark. Here again, there are some interesting surprises hidden in the numbers. Its best-seller was the Bentayga, it represented 42% of the firm's sales, and 2022 was the big SUV's most popular year — that's an impressive feat for a car released in 2015. The Continental GT range represented 30% of sales and the Speed variant accounted for 31% of those. The Flying Spur represented the remaining 28%.