Ferruccio Lamborghini Museum. It started with tractors, then supercars, helicopters & wine

Welcome to a new Harry's Garage video and this video I'm going to go into a bit more detail of the history of Lamborghini, Ferruccio Lamborghini, how it all got going and how they then developed cars like the Countach but there's a lovely backstory to it. And where I am is Ferruccio Lamborghini Museum. Now this one is just on the outskirts of Bologna. This was set up by Ferruccio's son, Tonino Lamborghini and having visited the museum at the Lamborghini factory, if you want to know a history of Lamborghini, this is the one to visit. The one at the factory is more on the modern cars that have got a complete floor, the new products, the very special Murcielagos, Diablos and Aventador sort of limited run cars. Good on that but the history, the family history and how what he was, how inventive he was, the tractor business, that is all here and I think it's one of the best kept secrets of Lamborghini. So let's step inside and I'll give you a tour. Okay we're inside now. It's quite an extensive museum if you look round. There's several sort of wings going off and there's various parts of Ferruccio Lamborghini's life and what he was doing. This is actually one of his tractor factories, the building, so it has links right back there. This is, it was set up I say by Tonino Lamborghini, so that's Ferruccio's son and this is his family who help run this museum now. I love this room, so this is like Ferruccio's Lamborghini's office at St Agatha. So when at Lamborghini, where we parked the Countach outside and we had the Revuelto as well, that office, he went up the stairs, this was his office as laid out, all the original furniture, just terrific to see. So that would have been 63 when that office opened, so that is the look of it. The thing about Ferruccio Lamborghini is his upbringing, he was the eldest son in a farming family but he's always fascinated with mechanical things and originally became a sort of blacksmith and he was working with metal and then war broke out and his expertise in mechanical things led him to helping out the army and fixing sort of their vehicles of the army and he became sort of automotive engineer if you like and that is his background and he didn't set out to be a car manufacturer, he set out with his knowledge of tractors and army trucks and things. His first venture was into tractors and this is the very early times, these are the very early Lamborghini tractors, I'm not sure what date these are, 1948, so literally just after the war and he could see there was going to be a revolution in agriculture and they need to mechanise all the local farmers and I think the great thing that happened, he'd set up doing these, he was sort of buying in components to make tractors, Morris engines of all things and introduced diesel at some point somewhere in this collection but then the Italian government gave him a real big help because they gave him massive subsidy to help farmers mechanise their farms, so long as they bought an Italian tractor, so between him and Fiat they really started to dominate the farm tractor market and that's what gave him a big boost and he built factory for this factory, this is what he was producing. I find it fascinating that these original tractors were all petrol, so using the Morris engine, you can see the spark plugs up here, diesel wasn't the thing and this is his first completely built tractor, so it says here 1951 built entirely by Lamborghini, exception of the engine of petroleum fuel, three and a half litre inline six cylinder Morris unit, so who knew Morris played a part in Lamborghini. Then we move on to the diesel tractors, diesels are much better type of engine for agricultural equipment because it's that torque, that low rev torque and when you're ploughing and cultivating that's what you want, you don't want top end power, you want grunt right from tick over, so this is 1952 and the introduction of diesel tractors. Crawlers, this is a peculiar one, look at this one, yeah you still steer it with the levers there so that differentiates the tracks and that's how you manoeuvre, I've never seen one with that sort of jockey wheel at the front, very odd. You also get a sense of the size of this business, it was doing really well, you can see him sort of entrepreneur, obviously life is good and there he is the early days, oh this car which I haven't mentioned, he did he did the Mille Miglia as I understand it, I don't think there's any details actually on here but yeah 1948 Mille Miglia and this is a Fiat 650 that he modified, what did he do to it? Yeah 567cc, he upped it to 650cc and over 5000rpm by various things, it could reach a speed of 130 to 140 kilometres an hour and he did the Mille Miglia in it. I think there were some issues and he packed up, he said no racing isn't for me but this is Ferruccio Lamborghini when he did a little tiny bit of competition and sort of realised he wasn't really a racing driver. There is another part of Lamborghini, Ferruccio Lamborghini and his business interests and that is sort of boilers for house heating, domestic heating and industrial heating and this is about 1959, so again before the cars came on board and he saw there was an opportunity to do heating, he'd been to America and seen these household boilers, said hang on a minute I think there's a business here and so set this up. So that is, you must remember Ferruccio Lamborghini, he was an industrious, he was an entrepreneur, he looked for opportunities and this was another sector he moved into. Still there's no Lamborghini cars at this point. Now it's slightly haphazard this museum really go around. These are some of the sort of family cars, don't quite understand, I haven't got details on all of them. Now we're going to enter the hall that explains the start of Lamborghini automotive, the car era and this is 1963 when the Lamborghini factory opened St Agatha. How did it all come about? Well I think the best source of that time is actually another YouTuber, Davide Ceroni, who does these wonderful interviews with the original team that Ferruccio assembled and gives a great story with Stanzazi, well worth watching, they're subtitled, they're in Italian but honestly the information Davide's videos contain are just gold dust. And it all came about because Ferruccio, obviously successful in justice, what's he going to drive around in? Well it's going to be a Ferrari isn't it? And he had a 250 Pininfarina, the coupe version and he was struggling with the clutch, he kept on replacing the clutch on it and somehow organised a meeting with Enzo and complained about the structure of the clutch and offered a solution because he knew about clutches, he built tractors, he knew he bought components. Enzo didn't take too kindly to being told by a tractor manufacturer about his cars and sent him packing. Ferruccio was infuriated, the story goes, and he said do you know what, I'm going to teach that Enzo Ferrari a lesson, I'm going to build my car and I'm going to build it way better than this Ferrari I have. And that's how Lamborghini cars came into existence. The thing also to remember about this period was he was very successful, he had money, so the factory that they built at Sant'Agata wasn't just a sort of small startup, it was on this scale and he got the best machining in and he obviously took Pizzerini, the engine, the V12 engine that he had designed for Ferrari, quad cam, high power and the team at Ferruccio Assembler was extraordinary, the design, the engineers, the whole thing, they were young and they were super enthusiastic and it was a golden era for automotive design and engineering. So he got the team together and because he was into a coupe car, a 250F Pininfarina, his first car was this. He wanted a gentleman's express car, two-door coupe, he didn't envisage Miura or Countach or anything like that, he wanted to show how they could build a better car like this but him dashing between meetings in Milan, Turin, down to Rome and this is the design of it. This was shown, I think it was the Turin Motor Show, the first 350 at this stage, this car, delicate body styling, quite close to what we actually ended up with, the 350 GT which I think is over there but this was the styling but he's displayed at the Turin Motor Show and everything, well he's a serious player, this Ferruccio Lamborghini. The other story I love is how he ended up with the bull as the emblem of Lamborghini, it sort of explains there and what I understand from it, Ferruccio is a tourist so he was born at the sign of the bull but he said the Ferrari, there they are, that prancing horse, I need something strong, powerful and you get out of way of a bull so he felt it was a more powerful symbol for an automotive company than a prancing horse. There we are, that is why it's always had the emblem of the bull and he absolutely loved it. The difference is this, originally when he first showed the engine it had these down draft carburettors, it was a really high horsepower racing engine but that wasn't any good for the production car, he needed a lower bonnet line and that's why it got these side draft carburettors you see here but you can see also he was making everything so including the gearbox he made the lot and that's basically very like my Espada is that set up and that all originated from this car, well this is a 400 GT, the first production car was a 350 GT, slightly more sloping, I think it's slightly prettier than the 400 GT but they haven't actually got a 350 here but that was the first car but his young team, they had other ideas, they wanted some excitement and they had a, they're doing okay with the GT cars but they wanted to do a real sports car, they had this race engine, what else could they do? Well that's another story in another hall and now we get to the moment the Miura arrived at Lamborghini and everything changed, well known the story behind this that they did this chassis, this thought of putting the engine behind the drivers, this is an idea of Dallaro who's part of that original team that Lamborghini had assembled to do the automotive cars and apparently if I look back at history he'd seen the Mini and thought the layout of the Mini is very interesting, our little British Mini with the engine and the gearbox in the combined and front wheel drive thing, hang on a minute, that sort of packaging, could we use that packaging and put the engine behind the driver here because it was all going rear driving, race cars and things and combine it with the gearbox and sort of did a quick chassis and showed this with the V12 for goodness sake and that again was a motor show and we said oh my god, he hadn't got a design for it and was approached by Nicola Bertone and said I would like to dress your car to tailor a body for it and Ferruccio said I'd be very grateful if you do that and this is the result and it happened incredibly quickly, the other thing about it they almost released it too early that Ferruccio wanted cash and he saw these customers, he liked making money and said let's get this car into production and there was a bit of kickback so the first early 400s, they almost developed it with customers until they got to this point and this is Ferruccio Lamborghini's very own SV so this is what was registered to him and this is sort of the latter line, it wasn't in production very long so this had some wider wheels and things, I noticed it's got air conditioning on it, those are those three vents over there, you didn't get that as standard and it's confusing to me because when I originally saw it, if you look at the front it has eyelashes and one of the things that went away with the SV version of the Miura were the eyelashes but Ferruccio's apparently is the only one still with the eyelashes and I think this was the glamour, suddenly Lamborghini Automotive just took off, people queued to have this, it was so glamorous even today it's worshipped the Miura but back at the factory they had other ideas they needed to develop where they're going to go next and that's sort of what happens in this hall, I just want to concentrate on this one because one of the instructions Ferruccio Lamborghini had for his team, he saw the excitement that the Miura had shown when they were showing it at Geneva Motor Show and all the customers came up, he says when we show a car it's got a shock, it's got to be amazing and it's got to be completely different to what we did previously and 1967 on the Geneva Motor Show they showed the Marzelle, this was a new Lamborghini four-seater, it was a crazy crazy concept car, it was all glass, it had a rear mounted six-cylinder engine, basically they chopped the V12 in half, had a rear engine but it had four seats and gullwing doors and they looked at seeing if they could productionise it and I've never seen this before and I'm so grateful because this is a Lamborghini Espada prototype and they investigated doing the gullwing doors as you see here, so this is built 1967 and yeah they realised it was really hard to do and they decided not to do it. In 1968 they showed the two-door Espada like I've got but it's just wonderful to see this, I'm not sure why there's an Evo edition here, there must be a reason, why is that in here? I've no idea, it doesn't say anything about this, who knows? Anyway that was how originally the Espada was envisaged but even for someone who had loved exciting cars and the young team they thought we're not sure if that's going to work. Also you see how they how are they going to do the glass back window, that's quite interesting as well, that's completely different how it is now and it loses the glass window at the back, or does it? Are those meant to be? No they're the lights, so anyway there's the concept gullwing Espada, only one, and they obviously productionised it which we'll see in a moment over here. And then there's these Zeros like this, this is the development of the sort of 400 GT, so more compact, more sporting Lamborghini. This was where, Ferruccio Lamborghini, this was his love, he liked GT cars, so they had to do this line as well as the crazy Miuras. This is Rama, this is a shortened wheelbase Espada, so very tight in the back of these, more sporting was the idea, independent suspension, never looked quite right to me, there's nothing not quite right. At the back they did an S version, slightly more power as well, no idea what that is because that's got sort of Lotus Esprit rear window on it. So this must be, oh the Araco prototype, 1970, wow that is early. Yeah I suppose they were looking at what Ferrari were doing and they had success with the V8 cars, the 308, and that's where the Araco came in and it didn't, it almost drained Lamborghini. This wasn't a particularly good time for Lamborghini, he was draining cash on this, it wasn't coming out as he wanted it, and there were industrialations issues at the plant as well. You know we'd shown them Arzel, what were they going to do next, well and the SV version of the Miura, and then they came along with this, Gandini's masterpiece, the Countach, the original 5000 Countach, and this car was shown at Geneva and again it was a wow moment. And Dara once said to me, we tried to correct everything we'd learnt on Miura, we rushed the Miura into production with Countach, we had a real nutter look at it. And all the guys were sort of racing background, they were desperate for Ferruccio to go racing, so that's why Michael, when they actually productionised it, and that green car we saw at Lamborghini, here's number one there, it had rose jointed suspension, it had the tubular chassis on it, it was much stiffer construction, and it was, they hoped, a base for the race car, but Ferruccio was having none of it, he wanted to keep his millionaire friends happy, he wanted to do road cars, he saw no reason to do the race cars. Now this, is this a QV, so this yeah, this is a just the same as mine, it's the only example of Countach I've seen in here, but this would be about 1985-86. Looks a beautiful example actually, oh and I can also see it's got the carbon, well the Kevlar front hatch, you can see the dimples on it from that, but I just want to look at this, so this is a Bob Wallace special, so Bob Wallace was the development driver, he came in right at the start, he did Miura, and then did Countach, but he was desperate to do racing, or really hardcore cars, and this is the Yama SVR, and this is 1972, and it's basically, he blueprinted the engine, he's got more power from the V12, I think they say it's 5, 375 horsepower, 380 horsepower, something like that, but stripped out all the weight, lowered all the things you'd normally do, tried to get as much weight out of it, Perspex windows, wing etc, but yes as I say, Ferruccio's having none of it, and Bob Wallace then left in 1974 I think it was, around the time that Ferruccio sold Lamborghini. But just great to see these cars, that is the only place you'll see a Goldwing Espada is in this museum. The other part of Ferruccio again, remember, super successful entrepreneur of all these companies, what else is he going to do? Well he's going to do boats, and I just love this period here, and this is his Reaver, which I would love to see one day, he didn't just have a regular, normally he had a V8 engine, American engine powering your Reaver, not Ferruccio, he stuck two V12s in his Reaver, there it is, there he is sitting with the engines at the back, god knows what that sounded like, but what a piece of history it is, there he is, doesn't say which year this is, but I suspect it's in the late 60s, Acorama, there we are, and there's the model of the boat, I think that's a more modern photograph, I would imagine. But boats sort of played a part at Lamborghini, I remember going to the factory late 90s, early noughties, and there were these boats behind the back, and they got into these marine V12 engines for race boats like this, huge engines, they're eight litre engines, and this boat has two of these engines fitted, and I think it's pretty successful. Two V12 Lamborghini, 8171cc, which beat all category records, winner, long, and the first of the long series of world cup winners, so very successful in boats, and powering boats with that V12, which is almost, it's huge, eight litre, so this is quad cam, downdraft carburettors, so more like my Countach quattro valve engine basis. I suppose Diablo was out at this time, but it was a big part of Lamborghini. Now this is completely random, and I've heard about the Lamborghini helicopter, but not actually seen it, it looks like it's flying, that's pre-photoshopped, I presume this actually flew. Yeah, Ferruccio had a look at doing this, I think he had so much on his plate, what is the year of this, 1965, must have been so exciting with all these new projects, what could he do next, he had the money, could he make helicopters, well perhaps not, but if you want to see a one and only Lamborghini helicopter, well you have to come to this museum. So there you go, what a museum that is, they're always the best ones when you don't know what you're going to see next, where else can you see a Goldwing, a Sparda, and then a Lamborghini helicopter. So yeah, check on the website when they're open, they're not open on Mondays, but they're open in the evening, and it's about six o'clock they close in the evening, but I don't know, it's just well worth a visit if you really want to know that early history of Ferruccio Lamborghini and how he got going, and just see those other parts, you know, the tractors, the boilers, all sorts, F1 engines hiding in there, so yeah, lots to see. So I hope you enjoyed this video, keep watching, keep subscribing, more videos coming on very soon.