Lights to Flag at Monza: The EVO2 Opens Its Account
A new GT3 car that wins immediately tells the paddock everything it needs to know. On June 25, 2023, VS Racing’s Artem Petrov and Riccardo Cazzaniga drove the #60 Lamborghini Huracán GT3 EVO2 to a commanding lights-to-flag victory in race two of the Italian GT Championship Sprint Cup’s second round at Monza, finishing 15.120 seconds clear of the second-placed entry. The margin looks even more impressive considering the weekend started with the crew languishing in 12th and 11th during free practice.
The turnaround came in Saturday’s second qualifying segment, where Cazzaniga posted a 1:47.338 to secure pole position. From the rolling start, he controlled the field through an early safety car period, then built a gap before handing over to Petrov with a mere 30 seconds remaining in the mandatory pit window. That late stop was a calculated gamble by the VS Racing strategists, and it paid off: Petrov emerged still in the lead and was never seriously challenged.
“I had a great start, maintaining the lead and then managed to settle into a good pace. The VSR team did an excellent job and, when he got back on-track, Artem just had to hold onto the lead,” said Cazzaniga.
Petrov, for his part, called Monza one of his favorite circuits and noted this was the first win for Lamborghini in the Italian GT Championship that season. The sister VS Racing Huracán GT3 EVO2 of Mattia Michelotto and Edoardo Liberati recovered from a poor grid slot to finish fifth, giving Squadra Corse two cars in the top five on the platform’s maiden Italian GT weekend.
Why a Domestic Win Carries More Weight Than It Appears
Customer racing is a volume business. The teams that populate grids across Europe, Asia, and the Americas pay for the car, the spares, and the factory support packages. Their willingness to commit depends on confidence that a new platform can fight for results from day one, without months of painful development at their expense. An early win on home soil, at a circuit every team in the paddock knows intimately, sends exactly that message.
The Italian GT Championship functions as both proving ground and shop window for Squadra Corse’s customer squads, so a dominant debut here resonates well beyond the Monza podium. One report also notes the EVO2 secured a victory in the ADAC GT Masters at the Red Bull Ring, suggesting the Monza result was part of a broader pattern of immediate competitiveness rather than an isolated result at a friendly venue. For teams evaluating their next GT3 purchase, that distinction matters enormously.
Victorious drivers and team members celebrate on the podium after a successful ACI Racing Weekend at Monza.
Inside the EVO2: What Changed Under the Bodywork
The Huracán GT3 EVO2 represents what one competitor article describes as the third generation of the Huracán GT3 platform. At its core sits the familiar 5.2-liter naturally aspirated V10, fitted with direct IDS gasoline injection, dry sump lubrication, titanium valves, and ten electronically actuated throttle bodies. The engine is restricted to comply with GT3 regulations, but the architecture itself remains one of the most characterful powerplants on any GT3 grid. In a class increasingly populated by turbocharged engines, that naturally aspirated scream still turns heads.
The chassis combines aluminum and carbon fiber in a hybrid structure developed in partnership with Dallara Engineering, the same firm behind countless open-wheel and prototype programs. One source reports a 42/58 front-to-rear weight distribution, a rear-biased layout that suits the car’s rear-wheel-drive configuration and helps plant the power on corner exit.
Aerodynamically, the EVO2 adopted all-new solutions to comply with the FIA’s 2022 technical regulations. Official imagery shows an aggressive front splitter, heavily vented hood, and a substantial rear wing. The related Huracán Super Trofeo EVO2 received a redesigned nose, larger brakes, and updated aerodynamics, and the GT3 variant follows a similar philosophy of incremental but meaningful refinement across every surface. Centro Stile Lamborghini worked alongside Squadra Corse on the design, ensuring the race car retains visual kinship with the road-going Huracán STO on which it is based. That connection between showroom and pit lane is deliberate: Lamborghini wants buyers to see the GT3 car and recognize their road car’s DNA in it.
None of these details alone explain a 15-second winning margin. Together, though, they describe a platform refined through a decade of racing into something a customer team can unload, set up, and win with on its first serious weekend.
The Lamborghini Huracan GT3 EVO2 powers through a corner on the iconic Monza race circuit.
The GT3 Battlefield: Where the EVO2 Fits Among Rivals
GT3 racing operates under a Balance of Performance system designed to equalize different manufacturers’ cars, so raw horsepower alone does not determine the pecking order. Ferraris, Porsches, BMWs, Aston Martins, and Fords all compete on theoretically equal terms, with organizers adjusting weight, power, and aero restrictions to keep the field close. Within that framework, the qualities that separate winners from midfielders tend to be subtler: mechanical grip, driver confidence under braking, how predictably the car rotates at the limit, and how well the engineering team can exploit the BoP window.
The Huracán GT3 platform accumulated a decade of development knowledge before the EVO2 arrived. That institutional learning, how to set up the car for different circuits, how to manage tire degradation across a stint, how to optimize pit strategy around the car’s strengths, is something no Balance of Performance adjustment can replicate. It lives in the engineers’ notebooks and the drivers’ muscle memory.
For customer teams weighing their options, the practical question is support infrastructure. Lamborghini Squadra Corse provides factory-backed technical assistance, spare parts logistics, and engineering guidance to its customer squads. How responsive and effective that support network is can matter as much as the car’s raw pace, particularly for smaller privateer operations like VS Racing that lack the resources of factory-affiliated superteams. The Monza result suggests the support pipeline delivered what the team needed precisely when it mattered, reinforcing the case that the EVO2 is a turnkey competitor rather than a development project.
An overhead view captures the sleek design and racing livery of the Lamborghini Huracan GT3 EVO2 on the track.
From EVO2 to Temerario: What Comes Next for Lamborghini’s GT3 Program
The Huracán GT3 EVO2’s competitive debut arrived at an interesting inflection point. According to Car and Driver, the Temerario GT3 will replace the Huracán as Lamborghini’s factory-backed GT3 effort, marking the first race car entirely designed and developed at the brand’s Sant’Agata Bolognese facility. Road & Track noted that while Lamborghini stuck with updated versions of the same basic Huracán for a full decade, Porsche alone released three entirely different GT3 platforms in the same period.
That context reframes the EVO2’s Monza victory. Every win the current car accumulates strengthens the competitive baseline against which the Temerario GT3 will be measured. Customer teams currently running the EVO2 will eventually transition to the new platform, and the confidence built through results like this one smooths that path considerably.
The next Italian GT Championship Sprint Cup round heads to Mugello in October, a very different challenge from Monza’s long straights. Elevation changes and technical corners will test the EVO2’s mechanical grip and aero balance in ways that Monza simply cannot. For anyone tracking the car’s competitive arc, Mugello will reveal whether the dominant debut was circuit-specific or a genuine statement about the platform’s breadth of capability. Either way, the EVO2 has already accomplished what matters most for a customer racer: it won before anyone had time to wonder whether it could.
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