So, you miss the Diablo. Me too. I had one on my wall at one point, next to a couple of Vipers, Ferris Bueller and, depending on how crowded things were, at least one Boondock Saint. If you’re a Gen-X or older Millennial type, maybe you can relate. And if you’re a wealthy member of either group, maybe you’re hoping to snag a poster-caliber performance machine of your own. So where is today’s equivalent?
Well, we sat down with Lamborghini Chief Technology Officer Rouven Mohr and design boss Mitja Borket and asked them exactly that. Their answer? Simple. It’s right there in the showroom.
“Sometimes there is this kind of discussion in the automotive scene that new technology is bad and it’s boring. Old stuff is cool and it’s exciting. This is not true to be honest,” said Mohr.
The hero supercars of the 1980s and ’90s may seem archaic and analog by today’s standards, but for their time, they were at the forefront of automotive performance technology.
“When the Diablo was state of the art, it was like a spaceship,” Mohr said. “And our job is to define the next level of spaceships.”
That’s not to say nostalgia has no place at Lamborghini, or that classic design cues won’t be referenced in its modern automobiles, but we should expect things to lean more toward homage than recreation.
“I always really enjoy explaining our design language or the cars that we do like songs, like music of an artist that is now 62 years at the top of the pops of the music business,” said Borket. “Because I like music, I like to go and see a nice concert, and I always like when there’s the starting song that is building up the mood, and then there’s the second song. Then, with the third song, the mood is changing. So there’s a constant buildup of a show to a pinnacle at the end, and you go home and you say, ‘Wow, that was a nice show.'”
“But I’m always playing a song that is always different to the song that you had before,” Borket said. “Because artists that are constantly playing the same, they maybe are in for two songs or five songs or seven songs, and then they’re gone, they’re history. I like the artists that are on for decades.”
“I’m a kid of the eighties,” Borket continued. “My band is Depeche Mode. So Depeche Mode is for me, a band that kept their DNA for 40 years, but they always did the new interpretation. They were kind of constantly doing not only a renovation, but they were kind of always defining themselves again.”
Mohr and Borket believe the Fenomeno embodies this philosophy.
“Those old cars, those old things, they represented the peak of the technology of that day,” Morh said. “And so the things that we want to appreciate about them, we need current cars to be reaching for the peak so that in 50 years time we can look back and appreciate what they were.”
“Even if I like the old stuff privately, and I have also a lot of old cars, the technology is progressing and so is the world,” Mohr said. “It is a playground where at the moment we are playing in 1%, perhaps less, I don’t know.”
“But trust the engineers,” he said, “and there will be really cool sh*t.”
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