Is Lamborghini Trying To Enter The 2018 WEC With The Huracan?

Italian sports carmaker Lamborghini has committed to make a factory-backed assault on GTE class of the FIA World Endurance Championship in 2018, including the classic Le Mans 24 Hours.

Opposite to its Italian road car rival Ferrari, Lamborghini has always stayed away from the top tier of motorsport in the past, apart from supplying V12 Formula 1 engines in the early 1990's to Larousse, Lotus, Ligier, and Minardi.

Even Formula 1 legend Ayrton Senna tested one of Lamborghini's engine in a McLaren at the end of 1993, before the project was abandoned. In 1998, the brand was sold to Volkswagen where it was headed by its sister company, Audi.

Lamborghini briefly entered the motorsport arena in mid 2000's in GT racing with Reiter Engineering, and has developed a wide range of GT3 programme with 20 customers racing behind the wheel of V10 powered Huracan. A single make trophy series has also been run since 2009 in Europe by its sporting division. A Young Driver programme was introduced too, in 2015.

With former Ferrari F1 team principal Stefano Domenicali taking the charge as CEO, sources in Italy reveal that Italian chassis manufacturer Dallara is collaborating with engineers at Lamborghini's Sant'Agata Bolognese HQ to study on design of GTE version of Huracan.

In WEC, Lamborghini will compete against its road-car market rivals such as, Ferrari, Porsche, Aston Martin, Chevrolet, and Ford. Lamborghini president Andrea Cordovani has already declined about involvement in any sort of F1 project, but admitted that "One cannot think of a brand as Lamborghini without motorsport."