Well, Lamborghini at Le Mans didn’t last long, did it? After much fanfare surrounding the Italian marque’s entry into the World Endurance Championship’s ultra-competitive Hypercar class - its first time competing in the top prototype category - the company recently announced that it would be pulling its SC63 (and the Huracan GT3) from the WEC and Le Mans next year after a pretty lacklustre season. Word on the street is the firm wants to further develop the car, which has been off the pace all year, but with Genesis joining the party in 2026 and possibly Mercedes too, who knows whether there will even be room for the squad if it decides to return.
Truth be told, motorsport has never been Lamborghini’s strong suit. Ferruccio Lamborghini was famously against factory-backed racing programs during the company’s inception, seeing it as a potential distraction from building road cars, so most of its competition endeavours have been in collaboration with existing outfits to keep costs to a minimum. For instance, its first outing at Le Mans came in 1975 when a customer entered their own 400GT into that year’s production class, only it never saw the start after an accident in practice. Its next appearance at Le Sarthe wouldn’t come until 2006, with a privately-run Murcielago R-GT much like the one you see here.
Co-developed by Reiter Engineering (which now builds KTM’s racers) and Audi Sport, the R-GT was built to go up against the likes of the Aston Martin DBR9, Saleen S7R and Corvette C6.R in one of GT1's most competitive eras. But while they all had the backing of their respective manufacturers, the car would be sold exclusively to privateers. The R-GT proved particularly popular with the JLOC (Japanese Lamborghini Owners Club), an outfit that had built its own Countach racer in the '80s and a ran factory-developed Diablo ‘Jota’ in the Japanese GT Championship in the mid-'90s. Once the covers were taken off the R-GT, JLOC snapped up the first chassis and placed an order for three more of the seven-strong production run.
The Japanese team would enter R-GTs in the '06 and '07 24 Hours of Le Mans, failing to finish on both occasions. Meanwhile, chassis 1061 here was earmarked for the Asian Le Mans series, winning the championship outright in 2009 and, with it, Lamborghini’s only title in the GT1 era. This granted JLOC a position on the Le Mans grid for 2010, though the team elected to use a different chassis which, again, expired halfway through the race. Chassis 1061 never would set foot on the Circuit de la Sarthe, but being the only R-GT to bag a championship has to carry more weight than a disastrous Le Mans outing, surely?
That’s not all. Chassis 1061 returned to JLOC after its Asian Le Mans Series success, before being sold to a Dutch collector ‘some years ago’. It was then sold again to its most recent owner, who called on historic racing squad BBM Sport to convert the R-GT for road use. And it’s just as ridiculous as it sounds, with the giant carbon rear wing, racing splitter, stripped interior and massive diffuser all intact. So too the 6.0-litre V12 (slightly smaller than the road car’s with restrictors for competition use), sequential gearbox and gutted interior, though there’s now a second seat to bring a friend along for an extremely noisy ride.
The road conversion isn’t a permanent one, with the seller suggesting that ‘a mere two weeks of work’ are all that’s needed to get it back into its racing spec. Presumably, that’ll make it eligible for historic racing events such as the Le Mans Classic (which we’ll be at next year: register your interest here if you fancy joining us) and Spa Classic. The asking price is £775,000, which comfortably makes this the most expensive Murci on PH at the time of writing - but for that you’re getting both a championship-winning GT1 racer and a road-going V12 supercar. Two for one, right?
1 / 6
