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Lamborghini Discontinues LP Naming Scheme For Actual Words

During the days of the Miura, Lamborghini used P400 for rear-mounted engine and 4 liters of displacement. But then the Countach entered production in 1974, switching to the LP400 nomenclature.
Lamborghini LP 610-4 badge 7 photos
Photo: telegraph.co.uk
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LP stands for Longitudinale and Posteriore. The Diablo had a different naming scheme, and the first-ever Lamborghini production car with all-wheel-drive used to be called VT for Viscous and Traction. Starting with the facelifted Murcielago and Gallardo, the nomenclature reverted to LP but added -4 for all-wheel drive.

This is how the Huracan came to be known as the Huracan LP 610-4 (with 610 standing for metric horsepower instead of displacement), but what happened with the Huracan Evo? The lack of an alphanumeric denomination is suspicious for the House of the Raging Bull, but there’s a reason for this change.

Lamborghini told Motor Trend that “the shift to real words, such as Performante and Evo, makes things easier to understand for the consumer and from a branding perspective.” A challenge, however, is securing the intellectual property rights to use these names worldwide.

Development chief Maurizio Reggiani claims the name of the high-performance successor to the Performante “is still under deep discussion” despite the fact Reggiani prefers Evo Performante to Performante Evo. The Superleggera badge that Lamborghini used on the Gallardo LP 570-4 Superleggera, on the other hand, isn’t coming back.

Sant’Agata Bolognese didn’t mention anything about the rear-wheel-drive Huracan, nor did it detail what’s in the pipeline for the mid-cycle refresh of the Performante. On the upside, rear-wheel steering helps the Huracan Evo corner with more surefootedness than ever before.

For the time being, the Aventador LP 770-4 SVJ is the most powerful Lamborghini on offer. The 6.5-liter V12 develops 759 horsepower at 8,500 rpm and 720 Nm (531 pound-feet) of torque at 6,750 rpm, translating to a Nurburgring lap of 6 minutes and 44 seconds.

Driven by Marco Mapelli and outfitted with a roll cage, the SVJ is the fastest production car on the German circuit, beating the Porsche 911 GT2 RS, Radical SR8 LM, and Lamborghini Huracan LP 640-4 Performante.
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About the author: Mircea Panait
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After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well.
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