A Farewell Tour That Starts With a Fight
A winning margin of 0.147 seconds. That is roughly the time it takes to blink, and it separated Lamborghini’s Huracán GT3 EVO2 from a Ford Mustang GT3 at the Red Bull Ring last weekend. The victory, scored by Team Engstler’s Finn Zulauf and Felix Hirsiger, gave Lamborghini an early lead in the ADAC GT Masters standings. The same weekend, 800 kilometers south at the Autodromo di Imola, VSR’s Georgi Dimitrov and Simone Riccitelli won the opening round of the Italian GT Championship Sprint Cup.
Two races, two circuits, two wins. For a car entering what is almost certainly its final full season of top-level competition before the Temerario GT3 arrives, the Huracán GT3 EVO2 appears disinclined to go quietly.
The Huracán GT3 platform, for readers less familiar with Lamborghini’s racing operation, is the customer race car that Lamborghini Squadra Corse (the brand’s dedicated motorsport division, based in Sant’Agata Bolognese) builds and sells to private teams. It runs a naturally aspirated V10, the same engine family as the road-going Huracán, tuned and restricted to comply with GT3 regulations. GT3 is the dominant class of customer sports car racing worldwide, a format where Ferraris, Porsches, BMWs, Aston Martins, and Fords compete on equal terms through a system called Balance of Performance, which adjusts each car’s power and weight to keep the field close. The EVO2 is the third generation of the Huracán GT3, designed by Centro Stile Lamborghini in collaboration with Squadra Corse, and it runs a hybrid structure of aluminium and carbon fibre tipped at a 42/58 front-to-rear weight distribution. The body itself was developed in partnership with Dallara Engineering, the Italian chassis specialist whose fingerprints are on everything from IndyCar to Formula 2.
ADAC GT Masters: The Final-Lap Drag Race at Red Bull Ring
The ADAC GT Masters is Germany’s premier GT3 championship, and according to one report, this marked the first time in the series’ 20-year history that the season opener was held in Austria. Zulauf set the tone early, posting a pole-position lap of 1m28.563, just 0.020 seconds quicker than Jamie Day’s Aston Martin. The sister Engstler Huracán, crewed by rookie Ethan Brown and Tim Hütter, qualified a solid sixth.
What followed in Race 1 was the kind of drama that makes GT3 racing compulsive viewing. Lamborghini says Zulauf led off the rolling start but struggled for pace during the first stint, dropping behind Kiano Blum’s Ford Mustang GT3. He clawed back the gap before the mandatory driver change, handing the #63 car to Hirsiger with the deficit erased. Hirsiger proved quicker than the Mustang’s second driver, trimming the gap to half a second in the closing laps. Stuck in the turbulent wake of the Ford, the Huracán appeared to have missed its window. Then, on the final lap, Hirsiger pressured the Mustang into running wide at the last corner. With more momentum on the exit, the #63 out-dragged the Ford to the line by 0.147 seconds.
Anyone who follows GT3 knows that a 42/58 weight distribution, combined with rear-wheel drive, gives the Huracán a distinct character: the rear axle is loaded under acceleration, which means corner-exit traction is strong, but the car demands respect on entry. That final-corner lunge, where Hirsiger forced the Mustang wide and then used the Huracán’s rear-biased weight to hook up on the drag to the flag, was a textbook exploitation of the car’s physics.
Hirsiger qualified third for Sunday’s Race 2, moved up a position at the first corner, and held the final podium spot through both stints. Zulauf took over at the pit stop and brought the car home in third. Lamborghini says Zulauf and Hirsiger now lead the drivers’ standings by 14 points heading to Zandvoort next month.
Italian GT at Imola: Ten Huracáns and a Penalty-Inherited Pole
The Italian GT Championship Sprint Cup field at Imola told its own story about the Huracán’s market penetration: Lamborghini says 10 EVO2s lined up among the 34-car grid. That is nearly a third of the field running the same platform, a reflection of how deeply the car has embedded itself in customer racing programs across Europe.
VSR’s Dimitrov and Riccitelli inherited pole position after the Ferrari that topped qualifying received a penalty. Riccitelli held the lead from the rolling start, while Franck Perera in the #72 DL Racing Huracán slotted into second after the first safety car restart, which was triggered by a high-speed accident involving Artëm Petrov’s #34 Oregon Team Lamborghini. Riccitelli then pitted and handed over to Dimitrov, a Lamborghini Young Professional Driver (the brand’s formal development program for emerging talent), who built a 10-second lead over Raffaele Maricello’s BMW.
A second safety car compressed the field with just one lap remaining. Dimitrov, with Maricello’s BMW right behind him, nailed the restart and re-established a comfortable gap on the final tour to claim his and Riccitelli’s first Italian GT victory. Perera and co-driver Luca Segù completed the podium in third.
“It was tough to judge exactly when to go, at the last safety car, but the team gave us a great car all weekend, so big congratulations to them,” Dimitrov said after the race.
Imola, of course, is one of the circuits where Squadra Corse developed the Huracán GT3 platform. The car knows every bump and camber change at the Autodromo Enzo e Dino Ferrari, and that institutional knowledge flows directly to customer teams through the data and setup packages Squadra Corse provides.
The Machine: What Makes the EVO2 Still Competitive
The Huracán GT3 EVO2 runs a naturally aspirated 5.2-litre V10 fed through 10 electronically actuated throttle bodies, a direct descendant of the engine in the road-going Huracán STO. Lamborghini rates the GT3 car at 585 horsepower (before Balance of Performance adjustments restrict it for parity), and the car weighs 1,230 kg dry. That power-to-weight ratio, roughly 2.1 kg per horsepower, puts it firmly in the competitive window of the GT3 class, where turbocharged rivals from BMW, Ford, and Porsche produce similar output through very different means.
The V10’s advantage is throttle response. A naturally aspirated engine delivers torque the instant the driver’s right foot asks for it, with no turbo lag to manage on corner exit. In a class governed by Balance of Performance, where outright power is equalized, that linearity becomes a genuine weapon. The driver can modulate traction with surgical precision, which is precisely what Hirsiger exploited in that final-corner drag race at Red Bull Ring.
The car’s development history reads like a European circuit tour. Beyond the factory in Sant’Agata Bolognese, Squadra Corse refined the platform at Vallelunga, Imola, and even Suzuka in Japan, calibrating the car for the wildly different demands of fast sweepers, tight chicanes, and high-speed compressions. Factory test drivers including Mirko Bortolotti, Christian Engelhart, Fabio Babini, Jeroen Mul, and Adrian Zaugg logged the development kilometers. Bortolotti, who also contributed to the car’s engineering development, is one of the most decorated GT drivers of his generation; Engelhart brought deep experience from the Blancpain (now GT World Challenge) series.
The six-speed sequential gearbox, paired with rear-wheel drive only, keeps the drivetrain simple and the car light. Without front driveshafts or a center differential, the steering communicates grip changes at the front axle more directly than any all-wheel-drive competitor. For gentleman drivers (who make up a large share of GT3 grids), that clarity is a double-edged sword: the car tells you exactly what it is doing, which means it also tells you, with uncomfortable honesty, when you have exceeded its limits.
The Talent Pipeline Behind the Results
Dimitrov’s Imola victory is worth pausing on for a reason beyond the result itself. As a Lamborghini Young Professional Driver, he represents Squadra Corse’s formal investment in the next generation of factory-affiliated racers. The program identifies promising drivers, embeds them in competitive seats, and gives them access to the factory’s data, engineers, and coaching infrastructure. When Dimitrov says the team “gave us a great car,” he is describing a support structure that most privateer efforts in GT racing simply cannot replicate.
Zulauf and Hirsiger, competing under Team Engstler’s banner, illustrate the other side of Lamborghini’s customer racing model: a private team purchasing an EVO2 (one web source reports pricing around €390,000 for recent models, with bespoke configurations potentially reaching €500,000) and receiving ongoing technical support from Sant’Agata. Car and Driver tested the related Huracán Super Trofeo EVO2 (Lamborghini’s single-make series car, a step below the GT3 in complexity) at its Lightning Lap event and reported a base price of $360,000 for that variant, giving some sense of the investment required to compete in Lamborghini’s racing pyramid.
For prospective customer racers weighing a Huracán GT3 EVO2 purchase right now, the practical question is timing. The Temerario GT3, based on Lamborghini’s new twin-turbo V8 hybrid road car, was revealed at Goodwood in 2025 and will eventually replace the Huracán in Lamborghini’s GT3 lineup. Car and Driver reported that the Temerario GT3 is the first race car entirely designed and developed by Lamborghini at Sant’Agata. Buyers entering the Huracán program today are getting a proven, mature platform with years of accumulated setup data, but they should understand they are buying into the final chapter of a naturally aspirated V10 era in GT3.
Where the Huracán GT3 EVO2 Stands Against Its Rivals
The competitive field at Red Bull Ring offered a useful snapshot of the current GT3 landscape. Zulauf’s pole-beating margin over Day’s Aston Martin was two hundredths of a second. The Ford Mustang GT3, which led most of Race 1, is one of the newest entrants to the class. One web source reports that a Porsche 911 GT3 R won a separate race at the same event, with a Haupt Racing Team Ford Mustang GT3 and a Schubert Motorsport BMW M4 GT3 Evo rounding out that podium. The Huracán, then, is competing against the latest machinery from five or six major manufacturers, and winning.
At Imola, the field was even more diverse: Ferraris, BMWs, and of course a small army of fellow Huracáns. The penalty that handed VSR pole position came at the expense of a Ferrari, a small irony given the two brands’ decades-long rivalry on road and track.
What separates the Huracán from most of these competitors is its engine architecture. The BMW M4 GT3 runs a twin-turbo inline-six. The Ford Mustang GT3 uses a turbocharged V8. The Porsche 911 GT3 R relies on a flat-six, also turbocharged. The Huracán’s naturally aspirated V10 is an outlier in a class that has moved decisively toward forced induction. That atmospheric character, the linear throttle response, the predictable power delivery, the distinctive wail that carries across grandstands, defines the Huracán’s identity in a way no spec sheet can capture. When the Temerario GT3 arrives with its twin-turbo V8, this particular sonic and mechanical signature disappears from the GT3 grid for good.
For Lamborghini fans who care about how the brand competes against Maranello and Stuttgart, these early-season results are encouraging. Winning on raw pace is one thing; winning by 0.147 seconds after trailing for most of the race, exploiting the car’s rear-drive traction advantage in a last-corner lunge, is the kind of result that builds a car’s legend. The Huracán GT3 program, across all its generations, now accounts for well over 400 cars delivered to customers worldwide. That installed base, combined with Squadra Corse‘s engineering depth, means the EVO2 will remain a fixture on GT3 grids for years even after its successor debuts.
What Comes Next
Zulauf and Hirsiger carry their 14-point ADAC GT Masters lead to Zandvoort, the banked Dutch seaside circuit that rewards aerodynamic confidence and driver bravery in equal measure. Dimitrov and Riccitelli will look to build on their Imola momentum in the Italian GT Championship’s next round.
The broader context, though, is succession. Jalopnik noted when the Temerario GT3 was revealed that Lamborghini stripped the road car’s hybrid system for the racing version, a concession to GT3 regulations and weight targets. The transition from atmospheric V10 to turbocharged V8 will reshape how Lamborghini’s customer cars feel, sound, and behave on circuit. Teams that built their setups, their driver coaching, and their muscle memory around the Huracán‘s linear power delivery will need to recalibrate everything.
For now, the EVO2 keeps proving that a mature, well-understood race car in the hands of skilled drivers and well-supported teams can beat newer, flashier hardware. Lamborghini delivered this car to customers starting in the second half of 2022, and it made its competitive debut at the 2023 Daytona 24 Hours. Three years on, the platform remains a winner. The next time a naturally aspirated V10 leads a GT3 field across the line, remember that the clock on this particular engine note is running down. Every victory from here is one the turbos cannot take back.
