We visit the Lamborghini Museum at company HQ in Sant'Agata

Fri, 07 Mar 2014

Last week, Lamborghini invited us to stop by its Sant'Agata Bolognese headquarters to have a look around the factory and pick up a few technical tidbits about its new Huracán LP 610-4. It won't surprise you to learn this, but Lambo's foyer is pretty rad.

Rather than front its offices and factory with a gift shop and a reception desk, Lamborghini puts its amazing heritage on full display by offering up the corporate museum as a first impression to visitors. We had coffee in the morning and lunch after the press conference in this space, with stunning Italian concept cars and production models serving as an impressive backdrop to it all. Not wanting to miss the opportunity to share the Lamborghini collection with exotic-car crazed Autoblog readers (you know who you are), we did our best to capture everything we saw in the gallery here.

With some variation, the museum's two floors are separated by vintage: older models downstairs and newer up. When you walk through the front door, you're flanked by two of the coolest Lamborghinis in the marque's impressive history: a 350 GT to the left and a perfectly green Countach LP 400 on the right. Perhaps our favorite car in the whole joint, the Countach's Bertone body is still almost impossible to believe. Up close, we're reminded how design-driven this car is; the seats are so far inboard from the scissor doors that it's difficult to imagine that engineers ever agreed that the shape was a feasible one for production or actual driving.

Of course, the Miura supercars (there are a brace of them) are always lovely to see in the metal (as is the Miura Concept Car from 2006 that's just upstairs), but it's almost as interesting to take in some of the less-famous models on display. Islero, Jarama, Urraco and Jalpa march through time from the late 1960s to the early 1980s; all offering design that challenged the accepted aesthetic of its micro-era.

Currently, Lamborghini has an extremely rare right-hand-drive LM002 occupying the place of honor next to the museum sign, painted in a mustard yellow-orange that's difficult to swallow on that boxy shape. Of course, you can't help but love the Rambo Lambo, even in that garish hue, for no better reason than the sheer audacity of its existence.

Upstairs, the museum has selected a large group of concept cars and very limited-run production models. Newcomers Sesto Elemento and Estoque were front and center, and massively impressive. Your author was on hand for the original introduction of the four-door Estoque concept, but didn't remember the car seeming so impossibly long or big of wheel when it was on the stand in Paris in 2008. The Sesto, meanwhile, looks just as advertised, which is to say roughly like a spacecraft sent to humanity for us to learn about the future. With apologies to the Countach downstairs, it might be the perfect Lamborghini.

Enough talk. Click through our gallerized tour of Lamborghini's HQ museum, and tell us about your favorite car (or racecar, or boat, or engine – there's a lot to see) in Comments.

By Seyth Miersma