With the SE30, Lamborghini’s Diablo began to come good. Ben Barry gets the inside story from a key Lamborghini exec – and tests the result with an exhilarating drive
Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure who’s in control here. A deserted stretch of Welsh asphalt winds out ahead, a single-arm wiper struggles to clear water streaming over the Lamborghini Diablo’s arrowhead windscreen, and a mighty V12 sings brusquely behind me, pushing out over 500bhp through the rear wheels alone. It’s like a flashback to car magazines I’d read as a kid of the mid-80s and early ’90s, except now those hazy reads are snapping into vivid first-person reality. I sense the Diablo moving around through a small-diameter steering wheel that’s contoured so perfectly it could’ve been moulded to my own palms, and feel it through the base of a rakishly reclined seat that says spacesuit, not jeans and jumper.
Already I understand why period road-testers didn’t routinely hang these things on the lock-stops and how, much more recently, Top Gear TV put one in a field – no question this Diablo would bite and that I’d need a compass as much as a recovery truck if it did.
I do have a scare. A tunnel of evergreens amplifies a rush of speed one minute, I’m skimming over well-sighted moorland the next, then, while rounding a quick corner, I find a trio of sheep organised in a kind of chicane formation. The Diablo’s right front tyre snatches and locks as I squeeze the aluminium brake pedal progressively but hard – a near-miss and cautionary reminder that the buck stops with you here (though there is traction control).
Lamborghini has been celebrating its 60th anniversary in 2023 and brought us the Revuelto, a new mid-engined V12 hybrid hypercar funded by both its modern-day success (9000-plus units annually) as well as the largesse and stability of the Volkswagen Group. Rewind 30 years and its Diablo SE30 predecessor was born into a rather different context – a ‘Special Edition’ V12 built on shakier foundations to celebrate Lamborghini’s first three decades as an uncertain future loomed large.
The Diablo was three years into its 11-year-long production run when the SE30 landed, while founder Ferruccio Lamborghini had recently passed away and was already some two decades absent from his eponymous company. And despite Chrysler’s take-over, Lamborghini was far from in the clear, as Diablo development attests.
Work had begun under the Swiss-based Mimr
