1000-Plus-HP Fight Club: Twin-Turbo Lambo Slays a Bugatti Veyron

February 19, 2015 at 6:07 pm by Robert Sorokanich | Photography by YouTube/UNDERGROUND RACING

The Bugatti Veyron is a legend.

Not only does it hold 2 current Guinness World Records for fastest street-legal production car—fixed-roof and roadster, naturally—it stands as a testament to what engineers can attain when fed unlimited amounts of cash and told not to return till they’ve built the super-est supercar.

Your little ones will don’;t forget the Veyron’s name.

Of course, that implies that any hot-rodder swinging wrenches on supercars sees the Bugatti as a target. When you’re a member of the thousand-plus-horsepower club, the Veyron isn’t just a legend.

It’s a benchmark.

Which brings us to this video, shot by Richard Fowler. Richard’s wild orange Lamborghini Gallardo LP-570 Superleggera is a supercar in its personal right: It is the most lightweight, sharpest version of Lamborghini’s angular Gallardo. The LP-570 produced 562 horsepower stock.

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Richard’s Lambo is not stock.

This Superleggera boasts an Underground Racing Stage 3 twin-turbo kit, sending an astounding 1250 horses to the wheels. As you will see, that is sufficient to completely trounce a 1001-horse Bugatti.

Yes, roll-racing is sort of cheesy, and no, we’re not acquiring the YouTube poster’s claim that Richard “waits nearly 2 seconds to go following the Bugatti requires off from a roll”—from where we’re sitting, that just appears like turbo lag.

But all of that aside, you cannot argue with the details: At this specific 1/2-mile runway race, the Veyron got spanked. And as Dom Toretto taught us, winning’s winning.

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This story originally appeared on roadandtrack.com via Jalopnik.

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1000-Plus-HP Fight Club: Twin-Turbo Lambo Slays a Bugatti Veyron

Personal the Rambo Lambo: Immaculate 1989 Lamborghini LM002 Headed to Auction

6 years ago in Iraq, when American soldiers wired explosives to a cruddy old pickup, they unwittingly chose to bomb the rarest and most Italian 4×4 to ever pound sand. It was a Lamborghini LM002, and whilst the planet wasn’t weeping over the loss of one of Uday Hussein’s personal vehicles—or Uday himself, 1 of Saddam Hussein’s sons who was killed by U.S. troops in 2003—exotic-vehicle enthusiasts winced.

Subsequent month, a far tidier example of the super truck will be provided for sale by RM Auctions. Listen to the money, even though, and you will uncover the LM002 to be a substantially undervalued Lamborghini, not only for its sheer insanity as a V-12 dune buggy but also as the precursor to the automaker’s next SUV, the Urus, slated for 2017. When our personal Brock Yates tested a single of the initial U.S. models in 1987—he nicknamed it the “Rambo Lambo”—the LM002 was $ 120,000 to start, or about a quarter-million bucks in today’s dollars. According to Hagerty’s, the average cost of an LM002 hovers about $ 95,000. The red 1989 model you see right here recently sold for $ 122,000, and it’s unlikely to bring considerably much more than that at auction.

This is a 6780-pound hulk that, in its day, was twice as fast as a comparable Range Rover ( to 60 in 7.7 seconds) and stopped shorter than most compact sedans. It came with a 5.2-liter Countach V-12 mounted up front, a 5-speed manual, a 2-speed transfer case, and 345-width Pirellis reinforced with Kevlar. It took nearly 3 decades prior to other 12-cylinder SUVs like the Audi Q7 V-12 TDI and Mercedes G65 AMG hit the scene. Who wouldn’t want a piece of history, that, as Yates place it, threw each and every other luxury auto “to the trash heap of social obsolescence”?

Amongst modern day collectors, it is merely not hot sufficient. Robert Meyer, who owns a shingle business in Washington state, sold this cherry LM002 in September since of its poor appreciation. Plus, it’s nigh impossible to uncover components and almost as challenging to service. Hence, to drive an LM002 is to threat grounding it indefinitely. Even when we tested one particular new, the electronics had been currently failing, a water line was rubbing against a fan belt and the clutch created a “Peterbilt feel like a Civic.” There’s also the issue of feeding the 76.6-gallon tank.

We tested this Lamborghini LM002 for our the October 1987 issue.

Meyer’s LM002, gifted to himself right after a divorce, is one particular of the luckier LM002s. Compared to the 6-carb model Yates drove 2 years earlier, the 1989 models came with fuel injection, an air-conditioning compressor that functioned, and myriad improvements that created the 444-hp beast less complicated to drive. Meyer did his own repairs and had small go wrong—he only place 10,000 miles on it more than 18 years—but beyond some seals for the transfer case and headers, “there’s nothing at all out there,” he stated. That goes for the aluminum and fiberglass physique, the Pirelli Scorpion tires, and something involving the 4-wheel-drive technique. Meyer had the front driveshaft removed, effectively underscoring the “2” in LM002, due to the fact that’s the portion that gets removed for each and every oil modify. According to Meyer, Lamborghini made the engine to run on 6 cylinders in case of catastrophic failure, and in that procedure, duplicated many of the components below the hood. As you might surmise, an LM002 is “sort of a pain in the ass when you are trying to function on it.”

Like most all pre-Audi Lamborghini models, the LM002 almost bankrupted the Sant’Agata company. The prototype 1977 Cheetah, created by an American defense contractor, didn’t win more than military commanders when it debuted at the Geneva auto show. The mid-mounted Chrysler V-8 gave the best-heavy Lambo nervous handling, and a year later, BMW cut ties with Lamborghini right after the organization allegedly funneled cash from the M1 to the Cheetah project. A completely revised LM001 debuted at the 1981 Geneva auto show, and before long, the LM002 was born as “just the factor for touring the front of the Iran-Iraq war,” according to Yates.

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The final LM American models came with the Diablo’s 492-hp V-12, however even with such frippery, none have observed the surging rates observed by the early to mid-1980s Countach. When the Urus debuts, may well LM002 owners comprehend the treasure on their hands, being aware of they guard the direct lineage to what will be a 200-mph SUV? “I could care much less about the new one,” stated Meyer. “It’s just another piece of high-tech shit.”

Personal the Rambo Lambo: Immaculate 1989 Lamborghini LM002 Headed to Auction

Perilous Journey: Taking the Lambo Caravan to Pebble Beach

Factors were going wonderful . . . till a tire blew, an oil pump failed, a tree fell on the auto, and I was hit by a runaway Ferrari.

If you haven’t driven an antique vehicle to the Monterey weekend, you’ve missed half the fun of going. Parking rules look to unwind as valets stand aside for vintage automobiles. The cops normally just give you a wave. You can park on lawns and sidewalks and drip oil onto Venetian tile and no one will yell at you. Thousands of people you’ve by no means met will see your automobile and feel its owner is cool, even if at that extremely moment you are someplace else dribbling shrimp cocktail down a silk shirt.

The last time I drove my 1970 Lamborghini Espada to Monterey, I had to replace all 6 Weber carburetors on the lawn at the Concorso Italiano. After I got house, I had to pull out the engine and rebuild it. I also rebuilt the suspension and brakes and replaced the radiator and rewired the cooling fans and replaced the exhaust system. I rebuilt some other stuff, as well, that I can’t even bear in mind the particulars of now.

3 years later, the green Espada was prepared to return. A group of 3 Espadas and a single 1967 400GT were to join me in a huge, merry, 60-cylinder convoy. 4 automobiles met on Wednesday morning, which was lost to a final-minute job replacing the 2 power brake boosters on my car, which were leaking hydraulic fluid profusely. Luckily, my pal Bob Huber, a fellow Espada owner who rebuilt his blue Series III Espada from a full wreck, had a spare pair. The only problem, he said, was that they didn’t work extremely effectively. And as soon as the brakes have been applied, at times they didn’t release. But otherwise, they had been fantastic. And they didn’t leak, so in they went.

We departed Los Angeles in standard L.A. targeted traffic about 2:00 pm on Wednesday, headed north. Things had been going swimmingly and we created a fabulous sight, buzzing the left lane as 4 spaceships from Planet Awesome. Then, just north of the seaside city of Oxnard, it all started to fall apart. Very first, the white Espada S1 of Mike Trivich blew a tire. The group got broken up in visitors trying to circle back in answer to his distress call. As we assisted Mike (he lucked out and was capable to get a replacement tube and tire in an hour), Jack Riddell in his 260,000-mile-plus 400GT called. It was both overheating and spewing oil.

(Final year, you need to know, Jack rebuilt the engine right after it dropped a valve seat and blew a fist-sized hole in the cylinder head and piston. He has owned the automobile since 1972 and driven it to the Pebble Beach weekend 34 instances.)

We mustered our 3 Espadas and drove up the road to meet Jack, who had landed in a gas station parking lot near Santa Barbara. It looked as if the Exxon Valdez had run aground in his parking space. Right after an hour of diagnosis, it was determined that the oil-pump pulley seal had failed catastrophically, and there was no way to continue on. 4 hours later, the tow truck dropped the automobile nearby at a friend’s house, Jack and his gear piled into one particular of the spacious, wagonlike Espadas (which is THE Italian exotic to have in such situations), and we continued on in the encroaching darkness. At our Pismo Beach layover, we realized it had taken 9 hours to cover about 200 miles.

The subsequent morning we arose and the (now-4) Espadas continued on with out difficulty. I was proud of the green gal. The rebuilt V-12 ran strong and flawlessly and—except for a noisy, poor bearing in the transmission—was each and every bit the smooth, comfy touring automobile that in 1970 price the equivalent of 4 Corvettes.

Then we got to Monterey. If you can picture Beijing traffic, but with Benzes, Bentleys, and Bugattis, you have Monterey during Pebble Beach weekend. Even though we waited in a line of vehicles on a narrow side street in Carmel, exactly where I’m fairly positive 18-wheelers are banned from narrow side streets by about 17 laws, such a massive rig suddenly appeared, going about 50 mph. It sheared off the reduced third of the canopy of the tree directly overhanging my vehicle, and all of a sudden my poor Espada was in a monsoon of pine cones, moss, twigs, and numerous massive branches, which crashed onto the roof and hood and poured via my open windows.

In my rage and misery, I yelled out of the window, “Thanks, you (delete) (delete) (delete) hole (delete) (delete) (oh, boy, delete) you mother (delete)!” It took 10 minutes to clean off the car and survey the damage, which, thankfully, was restricted to a couple of new scratches in the original Verde Pallido paint.

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Later, following I parked my Espada at the hotel, a silver Ferrari 575M parked straight across from me. How good, I believed. I’ve often liked the 575, drove 1 when they have been new. Quick and comfortable, it was type of a 2-seat Espada. When I came out later, the 575 had rolled down the incline into my car, at which point I realized that the 575M is a miserable steaming pile owned exclusively by douchebags who do not use their parking brakes. The harm was a mark on my irreplaceable stainless-steel bumper, which is now also slightly bent. I took a image of the scene and the license plate, stuck a big rock beneath the Fazz’s tire, rolled the Espada back so its transmission and rather weak parking brake wasn’t also holding back 2 tons of Maranello scrap steel, and left a tersely worded note asking the owner to please be a stand-up guy and contact me.

I’m still waiting . . .

Perilous Journey: Taking the Lambo Caravan to Pebble Beach