All About the Lamborghini Diablo

The historic Italian marque keeps producing a car as cars were meant to be until some years ago. The Diablo is an object of desire, a car that speaks to its owner’s heart more than any other car on production today (remember that Ferrari F50 and McLaren F1 are not produced anymore).

You can’t really understand the size of a Diablo until you actually see one on the road and you surely can’t understand the feel of a Lamborghini Diablo until you actually drive it. It makes more noise than you can imagine, yet, the sound of its V12 can instantly stir you up, it is more impractical than anything else you have seen in your life, yet still it is irresistible.

The Lamborghini Diablo is a high-performance mid-engined sports car that was built by Italian automaker Lamborghini between 1990 and 2001. It was the first Lamborghini capable of attaining a top speed in excess of 200 miles per hour (320 km/h). After the end of its production run in 2001, the Diablo was replaced by the Lamborghini Murci©lago. Diablo is “devil” in Spanish, which is diavolo in Italian.

The Diablo was Lamborghini’s follow-up to the Countach — a hyper exotic for a changed world. No longer could a supercar get by merely on irrational styling and unfettered performance. It had to satisfy safety and emissions standards.

At a time when the company was financed by the Swiss-based Mimram brothers, Lamborghini began development of what was codenamed Project 1232 in June 1985 as a replacement for the Countach model. The brief stated that its top speed had to be at least 315 km/h (196 mph).

The design of the car was contracted to Marcello Gandini, who had designed its two predecessors. When Chrysler bought the company in 1987, providing money to complete its development, its management was uncomfortable with Gandini’s designs and commissioned its design team in Detroit to execute a third extensive redesign, smoothing out the trademark sharp edges and corners of Gandini’s original design, and leaving him famously unimpressed. In fact, Gandini was so disappointed with the “softened” shape that he would later realize his original design in the Cizeta-Moroder V16T.

The car became known as the Diablo, carrying on Lamborghini’s tradition of naming its cars after breeds of fighting bull. The Diablo was named after a ferocious bull raised by the Duke of Veragua in the 19th century, famous for fighting an epic battle with ‘El Chicorro’ in Madrid on July 11, 1869.[3] In the words of Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson, the Diablo was designed “solely to be the biggest head-turner in the world.”

The project is believed to have cost a total of 6,000,000,000. The Lamborghini Diablo provided all this and more.