A Bank Holiday Double: Barwell and Imperiale Racing Write the Opening Chapter
Over the final weekend of May 2016, two Lamborghini Huracán GT3s lined up at the front of the grid at Oulton Park for the third round of the British GT Championship. Barwell Motorsport locked out the front row in qualifying, and in Race 1, car number 6, piloted by Liam Griffin and Adam Carroll, converted that pace into a commanding win. It was the first victory of the season for both Barwell and Lamborghini in British GT. The sister car, number 33 with Jon Minshaw and Phil Keen aboard, led for a significant portion of the race before a pit stop penalty dropped them to seventh. Keen and Minshaw recovered in Race 2, climbing back onto the podium in third, while Griffin and Carroll brought their car home fifth.
On the other side of the Alps that same weekend, Imperiale Racing delivered an equally significant result at the Autodromo di Imola. Mirko Bortolotti qualified on pole on Saturday morning, and he and co-driver Jeroen Mul controlled Race 1 from lights to flag. Race 2 unfolded in far messier fashion: heavy rain forced a Safety Car start and the stewards eventually red-flagged the event seventeen minutes early. Even in those conditions, Lamborghini machinery filled the podium. Stefano Pezzucchi and Giovanni Venturini (Imperiale Racing) took second, while Lamborghini GT3 Junior Drivers Riccardo Agostini and Alberto Di Folco, racing for Antonelli Motorsport, finished third.
Two countries, two championships, three podiums, and a pair of outright victories. For a car publicly unveiled only the year before at Sant’Agata Bolognese, the Huracán GT3 was announcing itself with unusual urgency. More importantly, these results carried a signal that would prove prophetic: the wins came not from a factory superteam but from independent customer operations betting their seasons on a platform barely a year old.
Building a Dynasty: From Inaugural Wins to Evo and Evo2
That distinction matters because customer racing is the entire point of the GT3 formula. When independent teams like Barwell and Imperiale win immediately on a new platform, it is the clearest validation any GT3 car can earn. Lamborghini leaned into that momentum without hesitation.
The original Huracán GT3 evolved into the GT3 Evo and then the GT3 Evo2, each iteration refining aerodynamics, cooling, and driveability based on data and feedback pouring in from dozens of customer teams worldwide. Barwell Motorsport, the team behind that first British GT win, extended its partnership with Lamborghini Squadra Corse and deployed Huracán GT3 Evos in the 2019 Blancpain GT Series Endurance Cup and British GT Championship. By 2024, the team was still running a two-car operation with Huracán GT3 Evo2s in both the Sprint and Endurance Cup rounds of the Fanatec GT World Challenge Europe, with Lamborghini factory driver Sandy Mitchell spearheading the No. 78 entry.
That a single customer team could sustain a competitive program on the same fundamental platform for nearly a decade speaks volumes about the engineering underneath. GT3 racing is a brutal environment for reliability, and the Huracán’s naturally aspirated V10 proved almost stubbornly durable across thousands of racing hours in the hands of gentleman drivers and professionals alike. The trajectory from Oulton Park to a decade-long dynasty was not accidental; it was built on a foundation those first 2016 victories revealed to be remarkably sound.
Two Lamborghini Huracan GT3 cars lead a competitive field of race cars around a track during a British GT Championship event.
Why Customer Racing Wins Matter More Than Factory Trophies
Lamborghini’s GT3 strategy deserves context that most race recaps skip over. For brands like Porsche or Ferrari, motorsport credibility stretches back decades. Lamborghini never had that luxury. The company’s racing history before the Huracán GT3 was sporadic, often driven by privateers rather than factory commitment. The Gallardo GT3 opened the door, but the Huracán GT3 kicked it wide.
Every Huracán GT3 sold to a team like Barwell or Imperiale generates revenue, but it also puts the Lamborghini name on grids in front of audiences who might never visit a dealership. When a gentleman driver finishes on the podium at Spa or Imola in a Huracán, that result feeds back into the brand’s desirability in a way no marketing campaign can replicate. The car earns its reputation in public, under pressure, with independent teams staking their own money on the platform’s competitiveness.
For prospective buyers of Lamborghini road cars, this connection matters more than it might seem. Engineering lessons from GT3 racing flow directly into the road car program. Cooling solutions, aerodynamic understanding, suspension geometry, software calibration: all of it gets tested under conditions far harsher than any owner will ever encounter on a mountain pass or a track day. The Huracán STO and the limited-run STJ, the final special edition of the Huracán line, both carried DNA refined through years of GT3 competition. The victories at Oulton Park and Imola in 2016 were not just trophies; they were the first data points in a feedback loop that ultimately shaped the road cars sitting in showrooms years later.
The Temerario GT3: A New Engine, A New Era, The Same Ambition
The Huracán GT3’s decade-long run is now winding down. The Lamborghini Temerario GT3 is set to replace the Huracán GT3 Evo2 as the brand’s factory-backed GT3 effort, and the transition represents the most significant engineering shift in Lamborghini’s customer racing history. As Road & Track reported, Lamborghini stuck with updated versions of the same basic Huracán platform for a full decade while competitors, Porsche among them, released entirely new GT3 cars in that span.
The Temerario GT3 marks a milestone as the first race car fully designed and developed in-house by Lamborghini at Sant’Agata Bolognese. In adherence to GT3 regulations, the car uses a modified version of the twin-turbocharged engine from the road car, while stripping out the hybrid system present in the street-legal Temerario. That shift from naturally aspirated V10 to twin-turbo V8 will fundamentally change the character of Lamborghini’s racing presence. For customer teams that built their expertise around the Huracán’s linear power delivery and distinctive exhaust note, adapting to turbo lag management, different heat rejection demands, and an entirely new powerband will be a genuine challenge.
The ambition, though, remains unchanged. Lamborghini wants the Temerario GT3 to do what the Huracán GT3 did starting at Oulton Park and Imola in May 2016: win races in the hands of customer teams quickly enough to build momentum and justify the investment. The competitive landscape is far tougher now, with Ferrari, Porsche, McLaren, Mercedes-AMG, and others all fielding mature GT3 programs with deep engineering resources. Lamborghini’s answer is to bring the development fully in-house for the first time, betting that tighter integration between road car and race car engineering will produce a faster development cycle.
One detail worth watching: Barwell Motorsport’s Bronze Cup entries in 2024 competed for an overall championship that carried an automatic invitation to the 24 Hours of Le Mans. That kind of pathway, connecting national and continental GT racing to the sport’s most prestigious endurance event, shows how far the ecosystem around Lamborghini’s customer racing program has grown since Griffin and Carroll crossed the line first at Oulton Park. The Huracán GT3 started as a promising newcomer. It became the foundation for a global racing identity that the Temerario now inherits.
