In 1990, Italy made a satanic gift to the world of speed. From the homeland of the catholic church came the devil himself, smartly dressed in Italian high-fashion clothing and looking as playboy as ever. We
are, of course, talking about a Lamborghini – one that carved its name with scarlet fire letters: the Diablo. It was the supercar of the hour, and its name is still openly worshipped, much to the agony of the crucifix-wearing society.
Even today, 25 years after it retired into eternal glory, the Diablo continues to tempt mortals into selling their souls for the temporary satisfaction of piston lust and speed gluttony. However, pleasing oneself with a Diablo in real reality is not for everyone to beguile in for a very prohibitive reason: money. One needs lots of them to get the chance to command the devil (if, by any chance, someone doesn’t know it, ‘diablo’ means ‘devil’ in Spanish).
The name itself belonged to a famous fighting bull from the sixties (that would be the eighteen-sixties), but gained worldwide fame on the rear of the Lambo supercar. The Italians in the high castle of Sant’ Agata Bolognese had one simple request for the model: to beat the 200-mph /320-kph mark – it had to be as fast as it looked.
And the car more than delivered: Rally driver Sandro Munari recorded a 340 kph / 211 mph figure on the Nardo test track. Not too bad, considering the 5.7-liter V12’s output of ‘just’ 485 hp (492 PS) sent through a five-speed manual to the rear wheels. One super-special Diablo was awarded an equally special engine tune-up that put the peak power at 595 hp (603 PS). It was the Diablo SE30 Jota of 1993 (SE stands for Special Edition 30 – the number of years since the company had been founded).
Photo: instagram.com/@moddedform
All of the above perfectly explain the continuous fascination for a model that stood high on the shoulders of the Miura and the Countach. But, like all things made by humans, even the Diablo had to come to an end, eventually. At least its assembly did because the fame will live on for as long as automobiles will roam the Earth (and most probably the heavens of the future).
In the meantime, we can indulge in playing the not-so-age-old game of virtual fantasy, courtesy of the other reality, the virtual one. It’s the habitat of pixel-taming car designers and visualists, and it's there that every idea comes to (a surrogate of) life. Hence, the Diablo rose from its fiery lair of internal combustion, put on the Luciferic purple garment, and possessed a pixel-carved body. Or eight at once, to be fair, through a secret pact it made with the Modded Form social media persona of a 3D artist.
The cars are static displays (in eight variants) of what the Diablo would look like in 2024, provided he suddenly awoke with a desire to return to Earth and torture EVs and environmentalists with the cavernous bellows of roaring pistons. That the conceptual desires are all fire-powered is beyond doubt – the gaping mouths on the bodies (side and roof) gasp for oxygen.
After nearly two decades in news television, Răzvan turned to a different medium. He’s been a field journalist, a TV producer, and a seafarer but found that he feels right at home among petrolheads. Full profile
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