Lamborghini

There are more than a few people who have been quick to jump on Kazunori Yamauchi and his company, Polyphony Digital, for the glacially-slow gestation of Gran Turismo 5, the latest installment in the Playstation-exclusive cash cow franchise. After all, trans-Pacific rival Turn 10 Studios has released a pair of Forza Motorsport titles – numbers 2 and 3 – since GT5 development began in earnest about five years ago. Surely the Tokyo-based developer couldn’t have anything up its sleeve to make its latest product worth all that waiting…right?

Well, at last year’s E3 it was announced that GT5 would feature licensed content from both NASCAR and the World Rally Championship, and this year’s E3 saw confirmation of collaboration with your favorite motoring program and ours, Top Gear, as well as damage rendering that includes rollovers and variable time-of-day. But for those of you who thought Yamauchi and Co. had run out of awesome bombs to drop, guess again. In fact, at this week’s Gamescom expo in Cologne, Germany, they brought enough awesome bombs to lay waste to a city’s worth of naysayers.

If you stop and think about it, safes are some of the least sexy products mankind has created. They’re boxy and often lack any adornment or anything resembling an actual color. Basically, they are designed to spend their days just sitting there, housing valuable products and shielding them from the one-in-however-many-thousand chance those contents will be assaulted by the likes of theives, fire, and Geraldo Rivera (Yeah, we went there.). Apparently, that wasn’t enough for one fellow.

You see, the chap who commissioned Brown Safe Manufacturing (located in the San Diego suburb of San Marcos) to build the safe seen in these pictures wanted a valuables storage vessel that would match his Lamborghini. Suffice to say, Brown did a pretty good job of capturing the spirit of a supercar from Sant’ Agata (even if they didn’t make the door open vertically; boo hiss).

One of the unfortunate truth’s about the blockbuster racing game Gran Turismo 5 is that, if it were a spouse in couple’s therapy, its mate would almost certainly describe it as “distant” and “uncommunicative.” Other than a few updates here and there (some from series creator/director Kazunori Yamauchi, some not), the gestation of the latest and rumored-to-be greatest installment in the groundbreaking franchise has been kept under more wraps than a sumo wrestler attending a toga party where deep-fried Double Downs are merely the appetizers.

However, with the gimongous industry pow-wow that is the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3 to its friends) kicking off tomorrow here in Los Angeles, Sony and developer Polyphony Digital have decided to throw the fans a bone in the form of a new GT5 trailer. Well, “new” in the sense there's some heretofore unseen clips of tracks on the streets of Rome and the hills of Tuscany. Mixed in with these vignettes are previously seen looks at the likes of the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG and the Ferrari 458 Italia, as well as NASCAR at Indianapolis and Super GT at Tsukuba Circuit. Make the jump to see it all in glorious motion.

The dream of owning a Lamborghini is one held by many a petrolhead, but only a small fraction of such enthusiasts have the financial bona fides to make that dream a reality. What do folks do if they still really, really want to rock a Lambo? Many buy a kit to rebody a Fiero or some other cheap platform to create a car with the looks (if not the proportions or performance) of the real McCoy. Others build their Raging Bull tributes from the ground up. Ken Imhoff belongs to this latter group, and so does Chen Jenmiao.

Chen, a 25-year-old mechanic from Chenzhou City, China, apparently decided if he couldn’t buy his dream car, he’d build it, or at least something that resembles it. So with roughly $3,000 worth of material and fabrication skills in hand, he set to work. How did it turn out? Well…have a look for yourself after the jump.

The stock Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera is certainly no tagliatella bagnato when it comes to performance: 523hp, 150 lb. less girth than the regular Gallardo, and the normally optional e-gear paddle-shift transmission as standard equipment. But what if that wasn’t enough? What if one were to somehow, say, nearly triple the 5.2L V10’s power output and run the car in the Texas Mile standing-mile time trial? Hmmm…

Gallardo Superleggera owner (and apparent Queen fan) Richard Holt wanted an answer to that question badly enough to send his example of the 172 Superleggeras made to Underground Racing, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based outfit that specializes in stuffing twin-turbo setups under the hoods of sports and exotic cars, particularly Lamborghinis. The result of this particular power infusion? A nice, round 1,500hp, or 50% more than a Bugatti Veyron. Yowza on top of egad with a side of OMFG. What does all that muscolo look and sound like? Jump for the hot air-on-fuel action.

Over the years we've seen a fair number of ultimate garages that have quickened our pulses -  everything from a Porsche 911 Turbo hidden beneath a garden to architectural marvels that integrate home and garage for museum-quality automobile displays. Some car domiciles have been like something out of Batman while others are fit to grace covers of high-design publications like Dwell. 

While we definitely appreciated the clean modern aesthetics of Architecture Digest and Maserati's Ultimate Garage winner Holger Schubert's Brentwood home, the masterpiece just completed by well-known Japanese architect Takuya Tsuchida raises the game up no less than two notches.

The Geneva Motor Show is always a smorgasbord of the world's best exotics and supercars and this year is no different. So, it make total sense that the 2011 Lamborghini Gallardo LP 570-4 would make its official debut at this venue. The new Superleggera continues the precedent set by the first "superlight" variant of the Gallardo that came out in 2007 and sheds 154 pounds. Through the use of plenty of carbon fiber, polycarbonate and an aluminum body shell, this Lambo manages to weighs in at a svelte 2,954 pounds.

Not only was there a reduction in heft, but a bump in engine output as well. The original Superleggera had a 5.0-liter V10 with 530 hp on tap. The 2011 Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera benefits from 570 horsepower and 398 lb-ft of torque from its direct injected 5.2-liter engine. The sprint from 0 to 62 mph takes just 3.4 seconds with a top speed of 202 mph.

The Lamborghini Reventon is the Unobtainium of the auto world. With only 20 examples produced at $1.5 million a pop, you just won't see one of these things in the parking lot of your local Vons. It was inevitable that someone would come up with a conversion kit, the question has always been with the execution.

We've seen other Lamborghini customization packages, such as the Premier4509 SuperVeloce kit and been pretty amazed, so we know it can be done. The 2010 Lamborghini Murcielago Rev-Air Roadster is a pretty solid pass at duplicating the exact look of the amazing Reventon.