An 18-Year-Old Champion and a Brand-New Race Car
During the 2014 Lamborghini Blancpain Super Trofeo Europe season, an 18-year-old Italian named Alberto Di Folco, racing under the Autocarrozzeria Imperiale banner, clinched the PRO-AM Class championship with a round still remaining. The title arrived in the same year the road-going Huracán debuted at the Geneva Motor Show, meaning the Super Trofeo variant was barely out of its crate when Di Folco wrapped up the crown. That a teenager could dominate a class in a car nobody had raced before said something important about the machine underneath him: the Huracán Super Trofeo was already competitive enough to reward genuine talent rather than simply whoever adapted fastest to a quirky new platform.
Lamborghini’s official event summary described a German weekend full of drama beyond Di Folco’s coronation. Mul took over the PRO Class lead after the Bonaldi Motorsport pairing of Milos Pavlovic and Edoardo Piscopo suffered a puncture that dropped them from third to sixteenth. Autocarrozzeria Imperiale drivers Andrea Amici and Alberto Viberti filled the second and third steps of the PRO Class podium, while Mirko Bortolotti charged through the PRO-AM field after taking over from teammate Andres Josephsohn, hauling the Bonaldi Motorsport entry to third overall. The weekend belonged to Di Folco, though, and his championship carried a larger implication for Lamborghini. The Gallardo Super Trofeo had built the series’ credibility since 2009. Its successor needed to prove, immediately, that the one-make grid could keep producing meaningful racing results and meaningful racers.
What the Huracán Super Trofeo Actually Is
For readers more familiar with the road car, the Super Trofeo version occupies a different universe. Built exclusively for Lamborghini’s one-make series, it is not street-legal and was never intended to be (though Autoblog reported in 2025 that a Michigan dealer managed to title one for road use, which says more about Michigan than about the car). The naturally aspirated 5.2-liter V10 runs through a Motec engine management system and produces 620 horsepower. A full roll cage, racing tires, carbon fiber bodywork, aggressive aerodynamic elements including a prominent rear wing, and oversized brake calipers define the machine visually and functionally.
Succeeding the Gallardo Super Trofeo, the car went on to spawn EVO and EVO2 iterations over the following decade. Each update refined safety systems and electronics, but the core formula stayed consistent: strip a Huracán to its competitive essentials, equalize the field, and let driver skill sort the results. That philosophy is precisely what made the PRO-AM class interesting as a talent filter, and what made Di Folco’s early championship so telling.
PRO-AM as a Talent Incubator
One-make series exist across the supercar landscape. Ferrari runs its Challenge program, Porsche fields the Carrera Cup. What separates a good customer racing series from a glorified track day is whether it actually produces drivers who move up. The PRO-AM class, pairing professional and amateur drivers in shared stints, serves a specific purpose: it gives emerging professionals seat time in a competitive environment while gentleman racers gain the experience of working alongside them.
Di Folco’s 2014 title was not a one-off curiosity. According to one source documenting his career, he achieved three class victories and six additional podium finishes during that inaugural Super Trofeo season with Imperiale Racing. Six years later, the same driver turned up at the Nurburgring in a Target Racing entry alongside Kevin Rossel. Lamborghini says the pair claimed their first Super Trofeo Europe victory in the second race of that 2020 weekend, surviving a 1.041-second post-race time penalty for a pit-stop infringement. Di Folco’s start in that race was strong enough that he jumped into second position immediately, a move that set up the eventual win.
The through-line matters. A driver who won the PRO-AM championship at 18 was still competing in and winning Super Trofeo races at 24. The series kept him within Lamborghini’s ecosystem, developing his racecraft on a platform he already understood intimately. Few competitor publications connect those two data points, but for anyone evaluating whether Lamborghini’s customer racing investment produces lasting results, the Di Folco arc is a clean case study.
The Machine Behind the Results
Ownership discussions on enthusiast forums paint a vivid picture of what running a Super Trofeo actually entails. Multiple owners and prospective buyers on Reddit describe the maintenance burden as substantial, with experienced GT car owners noting that these machines demand roughly 30 hours of maintenance between track outings for amateur use, plus a thorough rebuild after approximately 30 track days. Alternators, subframe welds, and gear position sensors all require regular attention. The real cost is not the purchase price but the operational overhead: a trailer, crew support, and data engineering are baseline requirements, not luxuries.
For a professional driver like Di Folco backed by a team like Imperiale Racing, those logistics are handled. But the car’s demanding nature is part of what makes it an effective development tool. A race car that punishes sloppy preparation teaches discipline. A platform that rewards precise inputs over brute-force aggression identifies the drivers worth promoting. The Huracán Super Trofeo’s 2.05 kg/CV weight-to-power ratio means mistakes arrive quickly, and the naturally aspirated V10’s linear power delivery leaves no turbocharged safety net to mask throttle errors. The car does not flatter; it reveals. That quality, more than any spec-sheet number, explains why a championship won on this platform at 18 carried real weight.
The grey Lamborghini Huracán Super Trofeo race car is displayed on a wooden platform at an outdoor event.
From Huracán to Temerario: What Changes for the Next Generation
The Huracán Super Trofeo’s decade-long run as the backbone of Lamborghini’s customer racing program is winding down. The Temerario GT3, unveiled at the 2025 Goodwood Festival of Speed, represents a fundamental shift: Lamborghini’s first competition car to be fully designed, developed, and built in-house, a capability that Squadra Corse previously outsourced in part. The road-going Temerario replaces the V10 with a twin-turbo V8 and hybrid assistance, which means the next generation of Super Trofeo competitors will learn their craft on an entirely different powertrain.
For teams and drivers who built their programs around the Huracán’s characteristics, this transition means adapting to a new powerband, different weight distribution, and the complexities of turbo management in wheel-to-wheel racing. Whether the Temerario-based customer car will filter talent as effectively as the Huracán did remains an open question. Lamborghini has not announced specific details about a Temerario Super Trofeo variant or its timeline. What the Di Folco story demonstrates is that the series itself, not just the specific car, creates the conditions for driver development. The structure of PRO-AM competition, the consistency of a one-make grid, and the proximity to Lamborghini’s factory racing operation are the real assets.
What the Huracán era proved, from Di Folco’s 2014 championship through a full decade of EVO updates and regional series expansion, is that Lamborghini’s customer racing pipeline works. The next chapter will test whether that pipeline survives the transition from naturally aspirated simplicity to turbocharged hybrid complexity. For anyone watching from the grandstands or considering a seat in the series, that is the question worth following.
