We’ve already outlined the facts regarding the new Lamborghini Temerario in Matt’s reveal story. This week was an opportunity to see it in the UK for the first time, to sit in it, and - most importantly - talk to the people behind its development and learn the back story. The venue was Ladbroke Hall, in London. As an aside, the building was constructed in 1903 by Clément-Talbot as part of the Talbot works in Ladbroke Grove. It was a statement building for the company at that time. Rather than purely functional, it was designed as a grand showroom to wow customers – not unlike the modern trend for lavish customer suites, employed by companies just like Lamborghini, for customers to spec their new cars. It seemed a fitting place to hold a static launch, then.
For me, Lamborghini launches are all about the yin and yang. The excitement is palpable but I always come out in a cold sweat. The reason for the excitement is obvious: new Lamborghinis don’t come around often. Especially not ones with an all-new, in-house-designed drivetrain, which, in this case, includes a 4.0-litre V8, with two hot-vee turbos, a flat-plane crank, a seismic 800hp and an even ‘seismicer’ 10,000rpm rev limit. And I say ‘includes’ because that’s not the end of it. If you factor in three e-motors – two energising the front e-axle, and the other sandwiched between the V8 and the new eight-speed dual-clutch transmission – the whole shebang produces an ungodly, but quite wonderful, 920hp. This equips the Temerario with mind-boggling stats, like 0-62mph in 2.7 seconds and a 210mph top speed, all with a sprinkling of electric-only range to make you feel, at least, like you’ve done your bit for the environment.
Why the cold sweat, then? That’s the company’s naming policy, which, if you’re mildly dyslexic like me, is a nightmare. Typically, I’m only confident in saying a Lamborghini model name aloud after months, maybe years, of practice. Ladbroke Hall was packed with Lamborghini bigwigs, right up to commander-in-chief, Stephan Winkelmann, and I refused to mention the car’s name once. I was far too frightened I’d make a right arse of myself. No matter how many times I rehearsed it in my mind, ‘Temerario, Temerario, Temerario…’ the next time I tried to say it, it had morphed into something bespoke and stupid. I had visions of asking Winkelmann about his new ‘Temero. Sorry, Tamora. No, no, that’s a TVR…I meant… Tomato,’ and receiving an ice-cold stare to go with my cold sweat. As Abe Lincoln said: better to be thought a fool and remain silent than to speak up and remove all doubt.
Anyway, not earning Winkelmann’s wrath was a good thing because he sat down with me to give his take on where Lamborghini is right now. The Temerario completes the electrification of the range, making Lamborghini the first sports manufacturer to have all its models hybridised. He also told me that the Temerario’s drivetrain is unique to Lamborghini – there are no plans to use it anywhere else in the group, amazingly. The same is true of the Revuelto’s V12, and such a huge investment programme is possible only because of the rude financial health Lamborghini finds itself in. In the first nine months of this year, revenue has jumped 20 per cent to 2.43 billion euros.
That’s why he said the Urus was ‘the right thing for Lamborghini’. In part, because of the company’s history in building things other than supercars, and because it’s injected cash into the company by becoming its biggest seller. But asked whether there would be any further expansion into SUVs – perhaps a smaller one, along the lines of the Porsche Macan – and he said ‘no’. Nor does he think a longer wheelbase SUV is suitable, because it wouldn’t be agile enough, and he doesn’t see a four-door car – along the lines of the Panamera – in the future, either. These days, too few people want them. He doesn’t rule out venturing into the £1m-plus-hypercar or track-only models, though. ‘Where there is space [in the market] is only going higher than where the Revulto is,’ he said. Well, we look forward to that day, then.
To get the specific secrets behind the Temerario, we spoke to chief technology officer, Rouven Mohr, and head of the Temerario production line, Paolo Racchetti. Both were incredibly enthusiastic and enlightening about the challenge this project has presented. Mohr spoke more specifically about the powertrain and some of the key decisions behind it. First off, was the obvious question: why cull the fabled naturally aspirated V10 and go to a turbocharged V8? ‘It’s is clear, including to me, everyone loved the V10 naturally aspirated [engine],’ he said. ‘It’s an iconic engine and, from the emotional side, something appreciated by everyone…but the last four of five years, we have to admit that the V10, with a 640hp output, was not anymore at the state of the performance for this segment.’
After recognising that, he said they evaluated their options, which came down to a turbocharged V6 or V8, or a completely new, naturally aspirated V10. So why not the V10, then? Mohr said that, if they’d stuck with natural aspiration, to leave enough scope to develop the engine into the future the displacement would’ve been much bigger or, alternatively, the engine would’ve needed to rev much higher. He said a bigger displacement would’ve meant that the power and torque curves – and therefore the driveability – would be too close to the V12 of the Revuelto, and they wanted Temerario to have a unique character.
If they’d kept a similar displacement, but opted to increase the revs, it would’ve meant pushing the limit to something around 12,000rpm to achieve the required power. For a series production car that was deemed too risky. ‘You can do a 12,000 revving engine for a hypercar, if you produce less than 1,000 cars, but not if you want to achieve the success of the Huracán.’ For the record, that’s now Lamborghini’s most successful sports car ever – it’s sold in excess of 30,000 examples.
Another consideration that went against a naturally aspirated V10 was the size of the electrical element. To achieve their target of being the benchmark on power for the segment, the electrical element would’ve needed to be a far bigger percentage of the total powertrain’s output. Mohr said, ‘I am not the biggest fan of cars – in the supersport segment at least – that have a ratio of 30:70 or even 40:60 [electrical to combustion power], because then you have problems with the performance consistency if the battery is empty.’ The V8 hybrid powertrain they’ve developed has a ratio of around 12:88, and Mohr told me even if you hammer the Temerario around a track you’ll run out of fuel or tyres before you fully deplete the battery.
With the naturally aspirated option discounted, the discussion was between V6 or V8 turbo. He says they could’ve achieved the performance figures with the V6, but the step-change from V10 to V6 was too much. ‘We don’t think the V6 is fitting to our brand,’ said Mohr, ‘the potential for emotions, which is very important for us, the V8 with the flat [plane] crankshaft, has the higher potential than the V6’. So the choice of V8 was ultimately an easy one in the end. And, he told me, a decision they made before learning Ferrari had chosen a V6 for the 296. And judging how the market has taken to Ferrari’s V6, he says, ‘We were quite lucky with that decision.’
So a V8 with a flat-plane crank and 10,000rpm rev limit enabled the team to create the right character from the engine, but what does that mean? Well, it comes in three parts: sound, vibrations and driveability. Let’s dig into the sound first. When I first read up on this engine, the press pack mentioned an ‘additional sound symposer’ that ‘emits acoustic waves into the interior, creating an immersive auditory experience’. That sounded like piped-in, digital music to me, but Paolo Racchetti told me that’s absolutely not the case. What’s meant by a sound symposer is simply a drum with a membrane that sits behind the driver to amplify the natural vibrations of the engine. There’s no electrical amplification or augmentation - I can’t tell you how happy I was to hear that.
In terms of vibrations, a flat-plane-crank V8 inherently produces more of those, and rather than dial them out completely they’ve left them to be an integral part of the Temerario’s unique character. ‘The idea,’ said Racchetti, ‘is that when you’re driving this car, from 4,000rpm to 10,000rpm, you feel a level of acceleration but also vibration thanks to the crankshaft.’
Thirdly, there’s driveability, and it was back to Mohr to explain this element. ‘We wanted to have an engine that’s as close as possible to a naturally aspirated one, and what means naturally aspirated? You need a super-linear mid-rev region,’ he said. ‘If you rev this engine up in this region you even think from the driveability it’s naturally aspirated.’ He added that the electric motor sandwiched between the engine and gearbox adds the transient response at the bottom end, and the two huge turbos – the biggest from supplier IHI in this segment, apparently – are used to drive the mid-range.
That all sounds fairly typical, but it’s when you see the power and torque curves that you see something quite unexpected. Rather than dropping off at the top end, as you’d expect with a turbocharged engine, it’s increasing all the way to 9,500rpm. Mohr said, ‘The way this engine is reaching the 10,000rpm – how it’s deploying the power – this is the unique thing about this engine. The engine’s character is not comparable to anything, because we have these huge turbochargers providing enough boost that the car feels like it’s exploding [figeratively speaking, we hope] at high revs. From 7,000rpm on, the engine really starts to scream.’
Mohr said he’s a huge fan of the electric turbocharger in the new Porsche 911 GTS, and they considered that at the concept stage but, for them, it wasn’t the right solution. Partly this was due to the extreme temperatures produced by the turbos in a hot-vee area making reliability a concern. ‘You can do it,’ Mohr explained, ‘but for sure it’s an additional compilation.’ On top of that the energy you’d need to run such huge turbochargers would be too much. The other consideration was engine response – the transient behaviour on and off throttle that Mohr said was so important – was solved more easily by using the inline e-motor rather than electric turbos. The amount of air they have to move would potentially still create some lag.
What was the biggest problem to solve? According to Mohr, it was the 10,000rpm limit and a flat-plane crank. ‘The second-order forces are unbalanced [due to the crank] so you have continuous vibrations in the engine that, with the rotating mass, you cannot balance.’ The e-motor is connected to the crankshaft and therefore subjected to those second-order forces. And with such fine tolerances between the rotor and the stator, managing the vibrations was a tricky issue.
The other challenge was reliability. Mohr explained, ‘Usually, if you have a high-revving valvetrain like this, you need to adjust the free play between the camshaft and the follower from time to time. But we didn’t want that because it would increase the maintenance costs, so we developed the surface treatment of the camshaft and follower.’ That treatment is called Diamond Like Carbon (DLC). It was developed with the supplier for this application but has been used before in motorsport. DLC creates a very hard-wearing surface and Mohr says it’s so hard-wearing, ‘it ensures the valve clearances are guaranteed for life, without any adjustment needed.’ As a result, the Temerario’s service intervals are the same as the Huracán’s. And its durability testing met all the normal VW standards, although they increased the amount of testing at higher revs to ensure reliability.
I asked Mohr what’s the power potential for this engine in the future. ‘The exact figure, for sure, is a little too early to speak about,’ he said, ‘but you can imagine that at the moment we’re operating the combustion system with 200hp per litre, and our target was to easily overachieve that. So you could calculate that a four-digit number would be possible.’ By ‘four digit’ he means the overall power output of the engine, of course, which means that just the V8 element alone (not including the electrical side) could easily be producing 1,000hp at some point down the line. Mohr said that the electric output will be even easier to improve, which kind of boggles the mind. It means that a mid-engine, mid-level supercar – not a hypercar, remember – is likely to have well north of 1,000hp in the coming years. But Mohr is very clear about what the objective was here. ‘It was not so much worrying about the last horsepower,’ he said. ‘For sure, we wanted to make a statement, but the main development job was the driving emotions – for this, we want to be best in class.’
Moving onto the electrical side, the axial flux motors were developed specifically for this application in conjunction with a company called YASA. The inline e-motor is used mainly to enhance the drivability of the engine. It adds some power to the overall system, sure, but it’s the two motors on the front e-axle that add the bulk of the additional 120hp. And, as Racchetti pointed out, using an electric front axle, rather than one driven by the combustion engine, has plenty of other advantages. There’s weight, for one, because the front e-axle is just 73kg. And removing some of the mechanical components helps the packaging, too, meaning a bigger boot than the Huracán’s. You can now fit two cabin suitcases in the front – and, incidentally, there’s space for two more behind the seats as well.
The e-axle is also said to enhance the driving characteristics far beyond what was achievable with a traditional four-wheel drive system. As Racchetti pointed out, ‘Of course, we have an EV car with around five miles of electric range to cross a city centre. Then, in Strada, you have mainly a hybrid car, focused on delivering the maximum level of comfort. But, of course, a Lamborghini is starting from Sport, and in this mode, it’s rear-wheel-drive orientated, so the front e-axle is giving a little bit of torque to make the car more agile.’ The torque vectoring is at its most effective in terms of lap time in Corsa mode, but when you want to have some frivolity there’s a variable traction control system that enables easy drifting. The Temerario’s a serious bit of kit, no doubt about it, but it’s also about exploitable fun.
Packaging was a big issue. As Racchetti pointed out, with the combustion engine delivering 800hp, combined with the front e-axle, the battery, and the brakes, the cooling requirements had to be improved by ‘50 per cent compared with the Hurarcán.’ They also targeted improved aerodynamics, and from what we were told, were very successful in achieving those targets. The Temerari has 103 per cent more downforce than the Huracán, which extends to 158 per cent if you opt for the lightweight/ high-downforce Alleggerita Pack. But they didn’t want to stray far from the cohesive design and typical Lamborghini silhouette. ‘We had to find the right solution in terms of aerodynamics,’ Racchetti said, ‘avoiding to have bigger air vents, as well as no wings whatsoever, which involved solutions that were nice to see but also really functional.’
An example of this is the pod for the front hexagonal DRLs, which sits in front of the radiators. Within the DRL signature, there’s a hole. This has a venturi inside that accelerates the air through the radiators, increasing the cooling effect without increasing the size of the radiator. There are holes around the headlights that direct the air from the nose in two directions: part of it goes up the windscreen, flows through the central channel in the roof, and down onto the engine cover to extract heat from the high-temperature turbos; the other part of the airflow from the front flows out and down the sides, where the wing mirror housing splits the flow again, sending some to feed the upper engine air intakes and the rest into the lower side radiator intakes.
Perhaps the most important parts are the underbody and rear diffuser, though. ‘On the underbody, we have a lot of vortex generators in order to improve drastically the downforce,’ Racchetti explained, ‘and also the length of the diffuser, which is really long thanks to the V8 engine and the transverse gearbox. For us, this [length] was crucial to be able to accelerate the air through the diffuser.’ One of the most surprising design features is the amount of rear tyre you see either side of the diffuser. The inspiration was motorbikes, apparently. How is that legal, though? ‘It’s right on the limit of what’s possible,’ Racchetti said with a smile, ‘but it’s homologated.’
So, what’s the Temerario like to sit in? One of the most important things, if like me you’re tall, is that you’ll actually fit – not always a given in Lamborghinis of the past. I had more than enough head and legroom, and the quality is, as you’d hope, extremely high. The steering wheel comes out really far to deliver a laid-back driving position, and it’s festooned with buttons. But, unlike modern Ferraris, they’re physical rather than touch-sensitive, which should make them much easier to use while driving. It’s easy to spot some VW Group switches dotted around – the lights, mirrors, cruise control stalk etc – so I asked Racchetti what else is shared with the mothership. ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘other than expensive bits, like the HVAC, which would make no sense for us to develop in-house.’ Everything else, from the software that runs the new infotainment system, the aluminium chassis, the 3.8kWh lithium-ion battery (that sits in the central tunnel to help weight distribution), and, of course, the whole of the powertrain, is all bespoke – developed either by, or for, Lamborghini.
Later in the day, I asked Mohr whether this had been one of his most enjoyable projects. He said, ‘I mean, this is a hard one to answer, because as an engineer it’s a little bit like a small boy – you always want to have a new toy. But it, for sure, is one of the most interesting I’ve experienced, and probably will experience, because of the degree of freedom. Usually, you start with something and you make a kind of evolution, and there are not many times when you start, like this, from scratch.’
Finally, I asked him a more general question: what are his thoughts on the future of the combustion engine? ‘This depends on the legislation,’ he replied. ‘If you ask what is the future, it depends on the segment. On the pure mobility side, driving from A to B, I am a car lover, but from an engineering perspective, there’s nothing better than electric. You can like or not like them, but from an engineering perspective, there is really nothing better. But the world is not only full of engineers and rational arguments; sometimes we speak of fun and emotions. There’s no reason today to ride on a horse, but some people still love to ride a horse. There is no reason for a mechanical watch to be preferred to a smartwatch, but people still buy mechanical watches. And I am pretty sure that, if the legislation allows the industry to continue, in some segments, there will always be a market for mechanical combustion.’
Let’s hope he’s right about that. And, in the meantime, hope and pray that the new Lamborghini Temerario lives up to the one sentence that stuck with me. ‘We’ve replaced one icon with another icon,’ said Racchetti. Fingers crossed that’s true.
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