The 2017 Silverstone Showdown: A Double Victory and Class Triumphs
Jonathan Cecotto and Vito Postiglione left Silverstone in May 2017 with two trophies and the PRO class championship lead, having swept both races at the second of six rounds in the Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe season. Their Imperiale Racing weekend was built methodically: Postiglione secured pole position, and the duo converted Saturday’s Race 1 into a controlled victory. Race 2 demanded something different.
Yuki Nemoto started from pole and held the lead through his stint, handing the car to Raphael Abbate of VS Racing, who maintained the advantage deep into the closing laps. With roughly three minutes remaining, Postiglione executed a decisive pass to take the lead and held it to the checkered flag. The result, according to Lamborghini, elevated the Italian-Venezuelan pairing to the top of the PRO class standings.
Every supporting class produced its own narrative. Kikko Galbiati and Gianluca Giraudi of Antonelli Motorsport claimed their first PRO-AM victory of the season, with Galbiati completing two overtakes after taking the wheel in third position. In the AM class, Polish duo Andrej Lewandowski and Teodor Myszkowski (VS Racing) recorded their third win from four races, extending a comfortable championship advantage built on two victories at the opening round in Monza. Carlos Sarrea of Autovitesse rounded out the class winners by taking his first 2017 Lamborghini Cup victory on a circuit he described as particularly challenging.
Postiglione’s Silverstone Legacy: Building on Past Success
Postiglione’s late-race heroics carried an echo that few casual observers would catch. Independent reports indicate he also won Race 2 at Silverstone in the 2016 Lamborghini Blancpain Super Trofeo Europe season. Winning the same race, at the same circuit, in consecutive years suggests a driver who understood Silverstone’s high-speed flow and knew exactly where the Huracán Super Trofeo could exploit a braking advantage or carry extra mid-corner speed.
For Cecotto, the weekend represented only his second outing in the Huracán Super Trofeo. Postiglione himself acknowledged the Venezuelan’s rapid adaptation, noting that Cecotto was demonstrating serious value despite limited seat time. Pairing an experienced circuit specialist with a fast newcomer is a classic customer-racing formula, and Imperiale Racing’s execution of it at Silverstone was close to textbook.
Loris Spinelli’s Race 2 performance also deserves mention. After dropping to the back of the grid during qualifying, Spinelli recovered 25 positions before handing the Antonelli Motorsport car to teammate Mikaël Grenier, who brought it home fifth. That kind of recovery drive, through a packed field of identical machinery on Hankook tires, speaks directly to driver quality rather than equipment advantage. In a one-make series, the car is the constant. The variable is always the person behind the wheel.
The Huracán Super Trofeo: Where Parity Reveals the Driver
The Huracán Super Trofeo succeeded the Gallardo Super Trofeo as the series’ dedicated race car, and by 2017 the platform was well established. Running a rear-wheel-drive configuration (the LP 620-2 designation), the car stripped away the road car’s all-wheel-drive system and much of its interior mass in favor of a lightweight, tail-happy machine that rewarded precise throttle control and punished sloppy inputs. That RWD layout is a deliberate choice: it raises the skill floor, makes overtaking more about driver commitment than raw power, and creates racing that builds genuine racecraft.
Lamborghini serves as the exclusive constructor for the Super Trofeo series, meaning every car on the grid rolls out of Sant’Agata Bolognese with identical specifications. When Postiglione passed Abbate with three minutes left, that gap was earned through tire management, corner entry, and nerve, not a horsepower advantage. For enthusiasts watching from the grandstands or following results online, this format delivers a cleaner competitive signal than multi-manufacturer GT racing, where Balance of Performance adjustments constantly shuffle the deck.
Ferrari runs its own one-make Challenge series on a similar principle, but the Super Trofeo occupies a slightly different position in Lamborghini’s ecosystem. It sits between gentleman-driver track days and the full commitment of GT3 competition, functioning as both a standalone championship and a talent pipeline. Silverstone’s results illustrated that dual purpose perfectly: gentleman racers like Lewandowski and Myszkowski competed on the same weekend, on the same track, as professionals sharpening their craft for higher-level GT seats.
Lamborghini’s Racing Ladder: From Super Trofeo to GT3 and Beyond
The 2017 Super Trofeo season matters in retrospect because of what Lamborghini built on top of it. Inaugurated in 2009, the series was always designed to do two things simultaneously: sell race cars to paying customers and identify drivers capable of stepping up to GT3 and endurance racing. By 2017, that ladder was producing results, with drivers who cut their teeth in Super Trofeo appearing in Blancpain GT Series entries and international GT3 programs.
The significance of that pipeline only grew in subsequent years. According to Autoblog, the Temerario GT3 debuted at the 2025 Goodwood Festival of Speed as Lamborghini’s first competition car to be fully designed, developed, and built in-house. Where the Huracán GT3 was developed in partnership with external racing constructors, Lamborghini Squadra Corse now controls the entire process internally. The Super Trofeo series provided years of operational data, driver feedback, and engineering lessons that fed directly into that capability.
For prospective customer racers weighing their options, the Super Trofeo remains one of the more accessible entry points into professional-level single-marque competition. Lamborghini controls the car, the tire supply (Hankook), and the regulations, which keeps costs more predictable than open-class GT racing. Exact budgets for a full season are not published by Lamborghini, but the controlled-specification format inherently limits the arms race that inflates costs in other series.
Championship Stakes and What Came Next
Silverstone’s results reshuffled the 2017 standings meaningfully. Cecotto and Postiglione jumped to the top of the PRO class after two rounds. Galbiati became the new PRO-AM class leader. Lewandowski and Myszkowski’s AM dominance, with three wins from four starts, looked increasingly difficult to challenge. The series was set to continue at Paul Ricard on June 24-25, with rounds at Spa, the Nürburgring, and a season-ending World Final at Imola still to come.
One detail that observant followers may have noticed: the 2016 series carried the “Blancpain” title sponsorship, while the 2017 season dropped it. Lamborghini did not publicly explain the change at the time, but the rebranding gave the series a cleaner identity tied directly to the manufacturer rather than a watch brand. Whether that reflected a commercial decision, a strategic pivot, or simply a contract expiration, the result was a championship that more clearly belonged to Lamborghini alone.
The broader takeaway from this Silverstone weekend is straightforward. Lamborghini’s one-make series was doing exactly what it was designed to do: producing competitive racing, developing driver talent, and stress-testing the Huracán platform under race conditions. The drivers who proved themselves in these fields went on to populate GT3 grids. The engineering lessons learned from running hundreds of identical cars across European circuits informed the next generation of Lamborghini race machinery. Silverstone in May 2017 was one weekend in a much longer story, but the results, and the names on the trophy, earned their place in it.
Gallery
