Thursday, April 8, 2010

Lamborghini Bravo - the best Lambo design, but never produced

This weekend I discovered some old car journals in my "archive" and found a car, very few people actually do remember - the Lamborghini Bravo. It's a really impressive design by Nuccio Bertone, 1.035 meters high, shown 1974 the first time at the Salon Turin. It remained a prototype, but influenced probably a great number of other cars. Different to other prototypes this one actually could be driven, despite missing windscreen wipers or other comfort details. The basis for the Bravo was the Lamborghini Urraco and with this the V8 3 liters engine. 6 seconds for the 0-100 km/h acceleration were certainly good enough in 1974.
The journalist of the German magazine Rallye Racing at least was pleased with the performance and the wonderful noise the car generated. He summarized his article with the following words: "I am getting out of a future car, but it's future is probably already the past". Which makes sense given he wrote this in 1977 and emission, crash and noise regulations already had made a car like this impossible by then. Too bad- what a silhouette!

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