The Bulls of the Sea: the history of Lamborghini engines by boat

If you think of Lamborghini, we are sure you will think of some of the most exaggerated sports cars; the most avid will also think of tractors, the most passionate will imagine the sound of an engine in full acceleration. Well, this sound has not only been heard on the road; in fact, engines made in Sant’Agata Bolognese have also equipped some boats, sporty ones of course.

It all began back in 1969, when Ferruccio Lamborghini was captivated by the allure of Riva motorboats. Legend has it that he personally went to Lake Iseo to sign the contract for his Aquarama (the number 278), during a lunch with Carlo Riva, Mr. Lamborghini said that he would take care of the engines.

Lamborghini boats and engines

He picked up the phone, called his trusty test driver Bob Wallace and ordered him to get two engines “right”; if you can call them that, the two V8 engines used by Riva were landed and two mighty V12s taken from the assembly line of the 350 GT arrived on the site, marinized thanks in part to the support of Lino Morosini, the head of Riva’s engine division.

Result? The 700 hp from the two thrusters propelled Lamborghini’s Aquarama to nearly 50 knots of top speed and could be heard for miles around at their maximum speed of 5,000 rpm, as per the owner’s request.

The union of Lamborghini and the sea, at that point, had begun. The Lamborghini brand, immediately recognized as an antagonist of Ferrari and known to enthusiasts for the performance of its cars, has seen its engines on board many racing powerboats. Especially in the 1980s, when the Emilian brand’s fortunes needed to be revived, ownership decided to focus on powerboating, which was experiencing a prosperous period. Lamborghini-powered boats began to triumph, thanks to the high power output of the Emilian V12s and far less weight than the mighty turbodiesels used by most crews.

This is the case of Miura, a 38-footer built by CUV shipyards in Viareggio in the early 1980s, which was purchased in 1984 by Alberto Petri and named after the famous Lamborghini signature car. The Tuscan racer decided to use this powerboat in the UIM World Championship, and the first move was to replace the two original V8 engines with a V12 twin from the Bolognese bull. On its debut, the racing powerboat immediately proved to be more powerful than the other competitors and confirmed its supremacy by winning the world championship in the same year. In the following seasons Petri employed the boat for more races around Europe before retiring it for good.

These successes can also be attributed to the Lamborghini engines used, which started from the base of the engines used on the Countach supercar: 12 cylinders in a 60° V-shape, displacements starting from 5,000 cc displacement and going up to 9,000 cc, with power outputs ranging from 550 hp to 775 hp.

Turbodiesel engines also put out more horsepower but, back in the day, they were really too stretched for the available technologies and, crucially in the racing world, they were much heavier than Lamborghini engines, which stopped the needle of the scales at 420 kg-a no small advantage in favor of the bulls of the sea. Let’s move to powerboating at the turn of the 1990s and 2000s, when offshore powered by Lambo dominated in Class 1: we’re talking about Fast 45 Diablo, powered by Diablo-derived thrusters, and Victory Team.

In short, since that 1969, the Lamborghini bull has never left the nautical world, as also demonstrated by Tecnomar ‘s recent Lamborghini 63 , solely inspired by the design of the Emilian supercars, but with two 2,000-horsepower MANs on board.