A Title Clinched in the Rain at Shanghai
At the Shanghai International Circuit in October 2016, Andrea Amici and Edoardo Liberati drove the FFF Racing Team’s Lamborghini Huracán GT3 to the GT Asia Series Championship. The title was confirmed across two rain-soaked races at the sixth and final round of the season: a seventh-place finish in Race 1 and a podium in Race 2, results that look modest on paper but reflected a grinding accumulation of points across six rounds and twelve races.
Lamborghini called this the “very first championship” secured by the Huracán GT3, a car that had been competing in customer racing for barely a year. The Gallardo GT3 had laid groundwork, but the Huracán program, developed entirely in-house by Squadra Corse, represented a different level of commitment. Winning a regional championship this quickly validated the engineering, the team structure, and the philosophy behind Lamborghini’s approach to customer racing. More than that, it established a template that would define how Sant’Agata competed in GT3 for the next decade: factory-developed hardware, a structured driver pipeline, and deep partnerships with customer teams willing to bet their seasons on the raging bull.
Why This First Title Reshaped Lamborghini’s Racing Ambitions
GT racing collects and forgets championships all the time. What made the 2016 GT Asia result significant for Lamborghini was the proof of concept it delivered across several fronts simultaneously.
The car itself told part of the story. The Huracán GT3 was Squadra Corse’s first fully in-house GT3 development, built around the road car’s naturally aspirated 5.2-liter V10 and an aluminum-carbon fiber hybrid chassis. One source describes the race-spec engine as producing approximately 585 horsepower, channeled through a six-speed sequential gearbox to the rear wheels. Winning a season-long championship, not a single sprint race, demonstrated that the platform could deliver both pace and mechanical durability across wildly different circuits and conditions.
The commercial model told the rest. GT3 racing runs on customer teams buying and operating manufacturer-built cars, and FFF Racing Team’s success proved to prospective buyers across the Asia-Pacific region that the Huracán GT3 could compete at the sharp end straight out of the box. Giorgio Sanna, Lamborghini’s Head of Motorsport, acknowledged FFF Racing directly, calling their work throughout the season “extraordinary.” That kind of public endorsement from Sant’Agata signals to potential customer teams that the factory stands behind its partners, not just its hardware.
Beating Ferrari Where It Counts
The championship battle came down to a direct, season-long fight between the Huracán GT3 and the Ferrari 488 GT3, driven by Anthony Liu and Davide Rizzo. Lamborghini describes it as a “long and thorough battle,” and the results bear that out. Amici and Liberati built their title through podium after podium: second in Korea, third in Thailand, second in Okayama, third and second at Fuji, second and third in Shanghai.
The technical contrast between the two rivals was fundamental. The Huracán GT3 relied on its naturally aspirated V10, a powerplant that delivers linear throttle response and a predictable power curve, qualities that matter enormously in wet conditions and for less experienced drivers managing tire degradation over long stints. One source reports the Ferrari 488 GT3 used a twin-turbocharged 3.9-liter V8, representing Ferrari’s return to forced induction in covered-wheel racing. Both cars operated under Balance of Performance regulations designed to equalize competition, which means the championship was decided less by raw horsepower and more by driver consistency, team strategy, and chassis behavior across varied circuits.
For Lamborghini, beating Ferrari in any series carries outsized symbolic weight. In GT3 customer racing, where teams pay for their equipment and results translate directly into future sales, outperforming Maranello’s latest offering was the strongest possible advertisement for the entire Squadra Corse program.
The Junior Program Pipeline That Produced Champions
Amici and Liberati were not hired guns parachuted in for a title push. Both drivers came through the Lamborghini Squadra Corse GT3 Junior Program, a structured development pathway that begins in the Lamborghini Super Trofeo one-make series and graduates promising talent into GT3 competition. Their championship validated the entire pipeline, proving that the playbook could produce results at the highest level of customer racing.
The Junior Program’s logic is straightforward: identify young drivers early, train them on Lamborghini hardware so they understand the car’s behavior intimately, then place them with customer teams where they can deliver results that sell more cars. Lamborghini’s version is tightly integrated with Squadra Corse’s engineering team, giving junior drivers direct access to the people who build and develop the race cars. Liberati’s career arc illustrates the long-term payoff. According to Sportscar365, he returned to compete in the Fanatec GT World Challenge Asia in 2024, driving a Lamborghini Huracán GT3 Evo 2 with VSR. That continuity, from Super Trofeo junior to GT Asia champion to a decade-long career racing Lamborghinis, is exactly the kind of brand loyalty and institutional knowledge that manufacturers covet.
The Shanghai finale also underscored the depth of FFF Racing’s Lamborghini commitment. A second Huracán GT3, driven by Jeroen Mul and Marco Mapelli from Lamborghini’s own Motorsport department, won Race 2 outright. Two cars from the same customer team finishing on the podium and winning the race demonstrated that the result was systemic, not a single-car anomaly.
From First Championship to Racing Dynasty
The 2016 GT Asia title became the foundation for everything that followed in the Huracán GT3’s competitive life. The original car evolved into the GT3 EVO, developed with Dallara and featuring significantly reworked aerodynamics and cooling, and later into the GT3 EVO2, which drew design cues from the road-going Huracán STO and complied with updated FIA technical regulations.
For prospective customer racing buyers evaluating platforms today, the Huracán GT3’s trajectory from a debut-season championship to a car that accumulated wins across multiple continents and series remains one of the strongest arguments for investing in a Lamborghini program. The naturally aspirated V10 became a known quantity, praised in sim-racing communities for its linear power delivery and, in real-world paddocks, for its mechanical reliability across diverse conditions.
As Lamborghini transitions its customer racing efforts toward the next generation, with the Temerario GT3 program on the horizon, the 2016 GT Asia win looks increasingly like the moment Squadra Corse proved it could build a complete customer motorsport operation. The car, the commercial model, the driver development pipeline, and the deep partnership with FFF Racing all trace back to that rain-soaked weekend in Shanghai, where a first championship became the blueprint for a decade of GT3 competition.
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