Lamborghini’s 15th IMSA Win Comes From Its Oldest Weapon
- Wayne Taylor Racing’s #45 Huracán GT3 EVO2, driven by Danny Formal and Trent Hindman, won the GTD class at Laguna Seca for Lamborghini’s first IMSA victory of 2026.
- The new Temerario GT3 scored fifth in GTD Pro, its best result in only three IMSA starts.
- Lamborghini is now running two distinct GT3 platforms simultaneously in IMSA, a deliberate overlap that keeps the proven car winning while the replacement accumulates irreplaceable race data.
Lamborghini’s 15th overall IMSA WeatherTech Sports Car Championship victory came at Laguna Seca courtesy of a car most manufacturers would already consider a legacy product. The Huracán GT3 EVO2, built around a naturally aspirated 5.2-liter V10 and rear-wheel-drive architecture inherited from the road-going Huracán STO, outran Aston Martins and a faltering Ferrari across a two-hour, 40-minute sprint race that rewarded patience and strategic depth over raw qualifying pace.
But the bigger story from Monterey is what was running alongside it. The #9 Pfaff Motorsports entry, a Lamborghini Temerario GT3 piloted by factory drivers Andrea Caldarelli and Sandy Mitchell, finished fifth in the higher-tier GTD Pro class. For a car making only its third competitive IMSA appearance since debuting globally at Sebring, that result represents measurable progress. Lamborghini says this fifth-place finish is the Temerario GT3’s strongest performance since its debut.
The two cars compete in different classes (GTD for the Huracán, GTD Pro for the Temerario), which means they never race each other directly. The arrangement is telling: Lamborghini is not phasing one out for the other. It is running both until the newer car proves it deserves to carry the program alone.
The Temerario GT3’s Learning Curve, Measured in Finishing Positions
Context matters when evaluating the Temerario GT3’s trajectory. At Sebring, its first race, Lamborghini CEO Stephan Winkelmann reportedly framed simply finishing the 12-hour endurance event as a “big achievement” for the brand-new car. The Temerario completed that race 10th in the 13-car GTD Pro field. By Laguna Seca, three races later, it climbed to fifth.
The improvement is real, but so are the complications. At Laguna Seca, Caldarelli was battling for position when contact from the #4 Corvette dropped the Temerario to ninth. A well-timed fuel-only pit stop allowed the #9 to recover to fifth, a result that owed as much to strategy as to pace. The Temerario GT3 is the first racing vehicle designed and built entirely in-house by Lamborghini’s Squadra Corse division (the motorsport arm based at Sant’Agata Bolognese), and its Balance of Performance settings are still being calibrated by IMSA based on early race data and dyno figures. Future competitiveness depends on continued optimization by both the team and the sanctioning body.
Caldarelli, who contributed to the development of both the Huracán GT3 EVO2 and the Temerario GT3, praised the new car’s torque delivery and improved drivability compared to its predecessor. For customer teams evaluating which platform to invest in, the trajectory from 10th to 5th in three races is encouraging. But the Huracán GT3 EVO2 won the race. That gap is the whole story of Lamborghini’s 2026 IMSA season so far.
Why Lamborghini Runs Two GT3 Cars Instead of One
Running parallel GT3 programs costs money, engineering bandwidth, and customer-team attention. Lamborghini is doing it anyway, and the logic is straightforward: the Huracán GT3 platform accumulated nearly a decade of race data, setup knowledge, and team familiarity before the EVO2 arrived. No amount of pre-season testing (the Temerario GT3 logged over 15,000 kilometers before Sebring) can replicate what a car learns from actual race weekends against actual competitors under actual BoP constraints.
The Huracán GT3 first competed in North America in 2016, joining IMSA’s GT Daytona class. Earlier iterations of the platform secured three consecutive Rolex 24 at Daytona victories from 2018 to 2020 and earned back-to-back manufacturer championships in 2018 and 2019. The original Huracán GT3 succeeded the Gallardo FL2 as Lamborghini’s primary race car, and the Gallardo itself was the brand’s best-selling road car. That lineage, from showroom to paddock, defines how Lamborghini builds racing credibility.
The EVO2 variant, which first competed at the 2023 Rolex 24 at Daytona, refined the formula rather than reinventing it. Giorgio Sanna, head of Lamborghini Motorsport, described the EVO2 as “not just an evolution” but “a brand-new car,” though the platform’s continuity is precisely what makes it reliable for customer teams. Teams running the Huracán GT3 EVO2 know its tire degradation curves, its brake bias preferences at specific circuits, its fueling windows. The Temerario GT3 offers none of that institutional knowledge yet. By keeping both cars on the grid, Lamborghini lets customer teams choose proven results now or invest in the platform that will define the next decade. No rival manufacturer in IMSA currently offers that choice.
STO DNA: How a Road Car Made the GT3 EVO2 Faster
The Huracán GT3 EVO2 draws its foundation from the road-legal Huracán STO, the track-focused variant that Road & Track called “the Lamborghini formula perfected” during its 2022 Performance Car of the Year evaluation. The connection goes deeper than shared bodywork. The EVO2’s most distinctive engineering feature is its air intake system: a hexagonal scoop and rear fin derived directly from the STO, connected to a snorkel that replaces the traditional side air intakes found on earlier GT3 iterations. Instead of pulling air from the car’s flanks (where turbulence from other cars and track-surface heat degrade intake temperatures), the roof-mounted system channels cleaner, cooler airflow directly into the 5.2-liter V10.
That V10, featuring titanium valves and 10 electronically actuated throttle bodies (one per cylinder, each independently controlled for sharper response), produces the kind of linear power delivery that turbocharged rivals cannot replicate. When a driver exits Turn 5 at Laguna Seca and rolls onto the throttle heading uphill toward the Corkscrew, a naturally aspirated engine responds proportionally to pedal input. A turbo engine responds to boost pressure, which arrives with a slight delay and a less predictable curve. In a race decided by tenths of a second, that predictability lets a driver commit to throttle application earlier.
Aerodynamic efficiency received similar attention. Squadra Corse developed a new splitter, rear diffuser, and carbon fiber floor for the EVO2. The rear wing sits on aluminum alloy pillars inspired by the STO’s design, allowing more precise angle adjustments than the previous generation. And the braking system, with new calipers and pads designed by Squadra Corse specifically for the EVO2, is optimized for both the punishing brake zones of endurance racing and the aggressive late-braking demands of sprint formats. Caldarelli praised the EVO2 for its “much better throttle responsiveness” and called it a “perfect machine for both endurance and sprint races,” highlighting how the car adapts to “every kind of driving style demands.” Those are not small claims from a factory driver who helped develop the car and races it against the best GT3 machinery in the world.
The road-going Huracán EVO, designed by Centro Stile Lamborghini and developed in part at locations as remote as the Lofoten Islands in Norway, produces 640 hp from its 5.2-liter V10 with a dry weight of 1,422 kg, yielding a weight-to-power ratio of 2.22 kg/hp. It sprints from 0 to 100 km/h in 2.9 seconds and reaches a top speed of 325 km/h. The GT3 race car operates under BoP restrictions that equalize power across manufacturers, but the underlying engine architecture, the chassis stiffness philosophy, and the aerodynamic principles all flow from the same engineering team at Sant’Agata Bolognese. Notable test drivers for the road car platform include racing driver Leonardo Pulcini and MotoGP rider Johann Zarco, a cross-discipline validation that speaks to the car’s breadth of dynamic character.
How Wayne Taylor Racing Won on Strategy, Not Just Speed
The #45 Huracán GT3 EVO2 qualified second, just 0.022 seconds off pole position. In a two-hour, 40-minute sprint format at Laguna Seca, where overtaking opportunities are limited by the circuit’s narrow layout and elevation changes, starting near the front matters enormously. But qualifying pace alone did not win this race.
Only three full-course cautions interrupted the event, an unusually low number for IMSA’s sprint format. Extended green-flag running shifts the strategic calculus entirely: instead of relying on caution periods to compress the field and neutralize pit-stop time losses, teams must predict fuel windows and tire degradation with precision. Formal ran the opening stint on the tail of the leading Ferrari before handing over to Hindman. When that Ferrari slowed with a mechanical problem, Hindman inherited the lead.
The critical moment came at the penultimate pit stop. Wayne Taylor Racing executed what racers call an “overcut,” a strategy where a driver stays out longer than the car ahead, building a gap through faster lap times on older tires, then pits and emerges ahead. The #45 overcame the #19 Aston Martin this way and retained track position over the #27 Aston Martin. With a fuel advantage over both the #19 and the #120 Porsche, Hindman moved back into the class lead with 10 minutes remaining and extended his margin to over three seconds. The official winning gap of 1 minute 20 seconds is misleading: the rest of the GTD class crossed the finish line after the overall-winning GTP car, inflating the number.
Formal described his stint as “a management job,” which is the most revealing comment from the weekend. In a car with deep development maturity, the driver’s role shifts from extracting maximum performance to preserving tires and fuel while keeping the car in a strategic window. Hindman called it “an incredible day” with “dicey” inter-class battles, emphasizing that “staying patient” and constant communication with the pit wall mattered more than outright aggression. That kind of race execution requires a car the team knows intimately, another dividend of the Huracán GT3 platform’s long competitive life.
The Huracán’s Racing Legacy and the Temerario’s Burden of Proof
Lamborghini’s GT3 history in IMSA now spans a decade and 15 victories, all built on the Huracán platform and its Gallardo predecessor. Three consecutive Rolex 24 at Daytona wins from 2018 to 2020 established the Huracán GT3 as one of the most successful customer racing cars in North American sportscar history. Back-to-back manufacturer championships in 2018 and 2019 confirmed it was not a fluke. The Formal and Hindman pairing, which also won at Mosport last season, represents the kind of driver-car continuity that compounds over time: they know the Huracán’s behavior under braking at specific corner entries, how its V10 responds to fuel load changes, where its tire degradation curve bends.
The Temerario GT3 must eventually match that institutional depth. On the Reddit motorsport forums, user sentiment after the car’s Sebring debut was measured: “fine, not great, not terrible, just fine” for a brand-new model. More pointed criticism focused on the engine note, which multiple users described as disappointing compared to the Huracán’s V10 scream. Whether sound matters in a race car’s competitive results is debatable, but for Lamborghini, whose naturally aspirated engines define the brand’s sensory identity, it is a detail that resonates with the enthusiast base.
For prospective customer teams weighing which Lamborghini GT3 car to campaign, the practical calculus is clear: the Huracán GT3 EVO2 offers a proven package with known setup parameters, established spare-parts supply chains, and a winning record. The Temerario GT3 offers a longer competitive horizon and the advantage of being Lamborghini’s future. Both carry the Squadra Corse engineering pedigree. The question is whether a team needs to win this season or build toward the next five.
Lamborghini’s willingness to run both platforms simultaneously, absorbing the cost and complexity, signals confidence that the Temerario GT3 will eventually earn its place. From 10th at Sebring to 5th at Laguna Seca in three races, the trajectory points upward. But the Huracán GT3 EVO2 just won. Until the Temerario can do the same, the overlap continues, and the old car keeps collecting trophies that the new one will need to match before anyone at Sant’Agata retires it.
