Gilardoni’s Spa Masterclass: A Third Straight Win in the Worst Conditions
On a darkening October afternoon at Spa-Francorchamps in 2020, Kevin Gilardoni threaded his #11 Oregon Team Huracán Super Trofeo through a downpour, past a fading leader, and into the championship lead. It was his third consecutive victory in the Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe season, and it remains one of the most compelling single drives the series has produced. More than that, it was the race that revealed a driver whose relationship with Lamborghini’s customer racing program would prove remarkably durable, stretching from that rain-lashed debut campaign all the way to a 2026 title fight still in progress.
The 50-minute race started on a damp but drying surface, the kind of conditions that reward aggression on cold slicks. Jonathan Cecotto, sharing the #7 GSM Racing entry with Patrick Liddy, converted pole position into a comfortable three-second gap during the opening stint. Behind him, a vicious scrap for second unfolded between Dean Stoneman in the #33 Bonaldi Motorsport car, Sebastian Balthasar in the #2 Leipert Motorsport entry, and the rapid Max Weering for Johan Kraan Motorsport. Balthasar fought his way past Stoneman around the outside of La Source after an earlier failed attempt at Les Combes sent him wide. Gilardoni, meanwhile, was biding his time.
Then the weather changed everything. As the mandatory pit window opened, heavy rain swept across the back of the circuit in that distinctly Ardennes fashion, arriving without warning and turning the track into a river within a lap. Some teams pitted early. Cecotto stayed out as long as possible before handing over to Liddy, who briefly emerged still in the lead. Gilardoni, carrying an extra three-second pit-stop penalty because his regular co-driver Dorian Boccolacci was committed to Spa 24 Hours duty, should have been at a disadvantage. He was not.
The Kemmel Straight Duel and a Championship Transformed
What followed was pure opportunism married to car control. Noah Watt, who had taken over from Balthasar, was making ground on Liddy when a snap of oversteer exiting Les Combes opened the door for Gilardoni. The Oregon Team driver slipped past into second and immediately began closing on the leader.
The decisive moment came on the Kemmel Straight. Gilardoni and Liddy ran side by side at full commitment on a soaking track, the kind of pass that separates drivers who merely compete from those who win championships. Gilardoni’s Huracán came out in front.
Behind them, the race was disintegrating. Weering had already crashed out trying to overtake the experienced Miloš Pavlović in the rain. Stoneman and Watt traded positions aggressively inside the final ten minutes, giving Liddy some breathing room in second. With two minutes remaining, Stoneman passed Watt down the inside of Les Combes, but contact on exit gave the British driver a puncture. He spun after Pouhon, and his championship challenge effectively ended on the spot. Race stewards later assessed Watt and Balthasar a 10-second penalty for the contact, though the Leipert pair’s margin was large enough to hold third.
“I’m so happy with this win, it was such a tough race. I had to fight a lot with the car, but we didn’t give up. The condition of the track changed about three times, so it was a big challenge.”
Gilardoni’s own words capture the reality. This was not a dominant lights-to-flag cruise. It was a win earned through adaptability, reading conditions faster than the competition, and trusting the Huracán Super Trofeo’s mechanical grip when the electronics could only do so much. That capacity to extract performance from chaos would become the defining trait of his Super Trofeo career.
A Lamborghini Huracan Super Trofeo race car with a striking multi-color livery crosses the finish line at Spa-Francorchamps.
The Supporting Classes: Pro-Am, Am, and Lamborghini Cup at Spa
Gilardoni’s Pro category victory was the headline, but the supporting classes delivered their own stories, and collectively they illustrated why the Super Trofeo format works as a competitive ecosystem rather than a single-class showcase.
Karol Basz and Andrzej Lewandowski claimed Pro-Am honors in the #16 VS Racing Huracán ST Evo despite absorbing a pit-stop time penalty for going under the minimum stop duration. Lewandowski’s opening stint from 11th on the grid was strong enough to put the all-Polish crew among the overall front-runners before Basz took over and drove to a remarkable fourth overall, finishing two places clear of nearest Pro-Am rivals Elias Niskanen and Mikko Eskelinen.
Fidel Leib and Yury Wagner extended their Am class form with another victory for Leipert Motorsport, closing the points gap to championship leader Massimo Mantovani, who could manage only third in class behind the Boutsen Ginion pairing of Marc Rostan and Giuseppe Fascicolo. Newcomer Ray Calvin took the Lamborghini Cup for Konrad Motorsport.
The depth of competition across all four classes at Spa underscored something easy to overlook: the Super Trofeo grid is not a procession. Teams run real strategies, penalties carry real consequences, and the Huracán Super Trofeo EVO provides a platform competitive enough that driver skill and pit-wall decisions determine outcomes, not equipment disparity. For a single-make series built to develop talent and retain long-term participants, that competitive integrity is the whole point.
From 2020 Vice-Champion to 2026 Title Contender: Gilardoni’s Super Trofeo Arc
Gilardoni’s Spa victory in October 2020 was the third of three consecutive wins that season, propelling him into the championship lead. He ultimately finished as Vice-Champion in what was his debut Super Trofeo Europe campaign, a result that announced him as a serious force in Lamborghini’s customer racing ecosystem and hinted at the longevity to come.
The following year confirmed it. Gilardoni won the 2021 Pro title with Oregon Team, claiming four victories across the season alongside teammate Leonardo Pulcini. One report indicates his motorsport background before the Super Trofeo included an Italian Formula Renault 2.0 title in 2012 and a stint in rallying that yielded multiple Italian class championships and WRC participation. That diversity of experience, from single-seaters to gravel stages to GT racing, helps explain his adaptability in conditions like the ones Spa delivered in 2020.
Fast forward to 2026 and Gilardoni is still a central figure in the series, now driving for DL Racing alongside Simone Iaquinta. Heading into the 2026 Spa-Francorchamps round, the pair held a four-point championship lead after five consecutive podium finishes. Spa, however, proved as unforgiving as ever. According to speed-live.it, Gilardoni was forced off the track in one race after contact with Jerzy Spinkiewicz, scoring no points. In a separate race, teammate Iaquinta initially crossed the line first, but officials confirmed Gilardoni in third following a safety car situation. The result: Gilardoni and Iaquinta dropped to second in the standings, seven points behind the leader, marking their first setback of the season.
The symmetry is striking. In 2020, Spa was the circuit where Gilardoni seized the championship lead. In 2026, it was the circuit that cost him the lead. Both weekends featured volatile weather, high-speed decision-making, and unforgiving consequences for even minor errors. Spa does not pick favorites, and a driver’s relationship with the place tells you as much about his character as any championship table.
Oregon Team’s Enduring Presence and the Super Trofeo’s Talent Pipeline
Oregon Team, the squad that carried Gilardoni to his breakthrough 2020 and 2021 seasons, continues to compete at the front of the Super Trofeo grid. In 2026, Oregon Team drivers Silas Lovén Rytter and Patrik Fraboni secured a double victory at Imola, placing them second in the championship standings. The team’s sustained competitiveness across multiple driver lineups speaks to the operational quality that defines the best Super Trofeo outfits, and to the kind of institutional continuity that keeps drivers like Gilardoni engaged with the series year after year.
The Super Trofeo’s structure reinforces that continuity. Established in 2009, the series now operates across three continental championships (Europe, Asia, and North America), each following a common format of six double-header rounds with 50-minute races. The season culminates in a World Final where drivers from all regional series compete for a global title. Drivers are categorized into Pro, Pro-Am, Am, and Lamborghini Cup classes, creating a ladder system that accommodates everything from professional racers to gentleman drivers.
The Huracán Super Trofeo EVO2, the current specification car used since 2022, runs Lamborghini’s 5.2-liter naturally aspirated V10 producing 620 CV at 8,250 rpm and 570 Nm of torque. It sits on a hybrid carbon and aluminum frame at a dry weight of 1,270 kg. Every car on the grid runs the same specification, which means the series functions as a genuine proving ground for driver talent rather than a spending war between teams with different equipment levels. The costs of running a full season remain undisclosed by Lamborghini, but the single-spec format at least eliminates the arms race that inflates budgets in open-regulation GT categories. Gilardoni’s career, spanning six seasons and counting in the same series, is perhaps the strongest argument that this model produces lasting engagement rather than one-and-done participation.
What the Huracán Super Trofeo’s Longevity Signals for the Temerario GT3 Era
The Huracán Super Trofeo platform has served Lamborghini’s customer racing program for over a decade, evolving from the original specification through the EVO and into the current EVO2. That longevity is not accidental. A stable, well-understood race car keeps team costs predictable, builds a deep pool of spare parts and engineering knowledge, and allows the series to focus on competition rather than constant re-homologation cycles. It also means that when Lamborghini does introduce a successor, the bar is extraordinarily high.
That successor is already taking shape. Lamborghini’s first fully in-house designed, developed, and built competition car, the Temerario GT3, was unveiled at the 2025 Goodwood Festival of Speed. As Autoblog reported, this represents a fundamental shift in how Lamborghini approaches motorsport development. Previous GT3 programs relied on external partners for significant portions of the engineering and construction. The Temerario GT3 brings everything under Squadra Corse’s roof.
The road-going Huracán was succeeded by the plug-in hybrid Temerario in 2024, which means the competition car follows the same generational handover from naturally aspirated V10 to twin-turbo V8 hybrid. For teams and drivers who built their programs around the Huracán’s characteristics, the transition will mean adapting to an entirely different powerband, altered weight distribution, and the complexities of turbo management in wheel-to-wheel racing.
What makes the Huracán Super Trofeo’s history relevant to this transition is the proof of concept it provides. The series demonstrated that Lamborghini can sustain a competitive, well-attended customer racing program over many seasons, attracting both professional talent like Gilardoni and passionate amateur racers. The Temerario GT3 will need to replicate that ecosystem, and the institutional knowledge accumulated through more than a decade of Super Trofeo operations gives Squadra Corse a significant advantage in building it.
Gilardoni’s career arc offers the clearest lens for understanding what Lamborghini’s customer racing program actually produces. A driver enters the series, develops through increasingly competitive seasons, wins a championship, and remains engaged with the brand years later, still fighting for titles in 2026. That kind of long-term loyalty and driver development is precisely the outcome a manufacturer-backed racing series is designed to generate. Whether the Temerario GT3 can inspire the same commitment from its next generation of competitors will be the real measure of Lamborghini’s motorsport evolution.
