Three Appointments That Signaled Where Lamborghini Was Heading
On September 2, 2015, Lamborghini confirmed three new appointments to its Management Board under then-President and CEO Stephan Winkelmann. Thomas Kolthoff, a 47-year-old mechanical engineer arriving from Audi AG, took over as Director of Quality. Federico Foschini, a 43-year-old engineering management graduate who had spent 16 years inside the company, stepped up to Commercial Director with oversight of marketing, sales, and after-sales service. Matteo Ortenzi, 35, an economics graduate with Lamborghini since 2004, assumed Foschini’s vacated seat as Director of Project Management.
Read as a standalone bulletin, the changes looked like routine corporate housekeeping. In hindsight, knowing what Lamborghini accomplished between 2016 and 2025, the reshuffle looks far more deliberate. The company was preparing for expansion unlike anything in its history, and these three directors would occupy the exact roles required to execute it: controlling build quality as production volumes surged, selling cars to an entirely new customer demographic, and managing the most ambitious product pipeline Sant’Agata Bolognese had ever attempted.
The Audi Connection: Kolthoff and the Quality Imperative
Kolthoff’s appointment carried a specific message. He arrived directly from Audi’s Quality and Development departments at the Ingolstadt and Neckarsulm plants, succeeding Holger Weichhaus, who returned to Audi as Head of Quality Assurance Neckarsulm. The revolving door between Sant’Agata and Ingolstadt was nothing new under Volkswagen Group ownership, but the timing mattered.
Lamborghini says Kolthoff brought extensive technical and management experience from Audi, and the practical implication was clear: the company needed someone who understood how to maintain quality discipline at scale. In 2015, Lamborghini delivered 3,245 cars worldwide, a record at the time and a 28 percent jump over 2014, according to one report. The Huracán was completing its first full year on the market and demand was accelerating. Somewhere in the background, the Urus SUV program was gathering momentum, a vehicle that would require Lamborghini to roughly triple its annual output within just a few years.
Building 3,000 supercars a year with consistent quality is one challenge. Building 10,000 is a fundamentally different engineering and manufacturing problem. Kolthoff’s Audi pedigree was not decorative; it was operational insurance for what the company knew was coming. Multiple owners on enthusiast forums credit Volkswagen Group influence as a turning point for Lamborghini build quality, frequently noting that post-VAG cars feel substantially more robust than anything from the pre-acquisition era. Whether Kolthoff personally drove those improvements or simply maintained standards already in place is difficult to isolate from public records. Andrea Costantini was appointed as the new Quality Director in February 2025, confirming Kolthoff is no longer in the position, though the specifics of his departure and individual achievements during his tenure remain undocumented in available reporting.
Foschini’s Commercial Strategy and the Urus Boom
Foschini’s promotion was the classic internal-talent play. Lamborghini says he joined the company in 1999, worked through Purchasing and Project Management, and ran the Project Management division from 2008 before taking the Commercial Director role on September 1, 2015. Sixteen years of institutional knowledge, applied to the department that would need to absorb the most dramatic demand shock in the brand’s history.
The scale of what followed deserves spelling out. One report indicates that in 2018, the first full year of Urus deliveries, Lamborghini sold 5,750 vehicles worldwide, a 51 percent increase over 2017’s 3,815 units. The Urus alone accounted for 1,761 of those sales, and over 70 percent of Urus buyers were new to the brand. By 2023, annual deliveries crossed 10,000 units for the first time.
Managing that kind of growth without diluting the ownership experience requires a commercial operation that understands both the existing customer base and the new one walking through the door. Foschini’s deep familiarity with how Lamborghini actually builds and delivers cars, earned through years in project management and purchasing, would have been invaluable in bridging those two worlds. Expanding the dealer network, calibrating marketing to attract SUV buyers without alienating supercar purists, scaling after-sales service for a customer population that tripled in size: these are the unglamorous operational challenges that determine whether a growth phase builds lasting value or erodes it.
For anyone who bought a Lamborghini between 2016 and the present, the quality of the purchase and ownership experience traces in part to decisions made in this commercial division during its period of fastest expansion.
Ortenzi and the Project Pipeline That Defined a Decade
Ortenzi’s appointment was the quietest of the three, but potentially the most consequential for product. Lamborghini says he joined the company in 2004, moved through Finance, and became Head of Controlling in 2012 before stepping into the Director of Project Management role at age 35. An economics graduate running the division that coordinates new vehicle programs might seem unconventional, but the skill set makes sense for a company entering a phase where financial discipline and timeline management would be tested by simultaneous development of the Urus, multiple Huracán variants, the Aventador’s successor program, and eventually the hybrid Revuelto and Temerario.
Project management at a low-volume manufacturer like Lamborghini is a balancing act between ambition and resource reality. Sant’Agata does not operate with the engineering headcount of Porsche or the budget flexibility of Ferrari’s publicly traded structure. Every program competes for the same pool of engineers, test facilities, and supplier relationships. The director overseeing that allocation shapes which cars get built, how quickly they reach market, and whether they arrive with the level of development maturity buyers expect.
The decade following Ortenzi’s appointment produced the Huracán Performante, the Aventador SVJ, the Urus, the Sián, the Countach LPI 800-4, and eventually the Revuelto, a hybrid V12 flagship that represented Lamborghini’s most complex engineering undertaking to date. Attributing all of that to a single executive would be reductive, but the project management function sits at the center of every one of those programs.
What the 2015 Reshuffle Reveals About Lamborghini’s Playbook
The pattern Lamborghini followed in 2015 tells you something about how the company balances its dual identity. Importing Audi process expertise for quality while promoting long-tenured insiders for commercial and project roles reflects a brand that operates within the Volkswagen Group’s industrial framework but sells a product defined by Italian character and emotional intensity. The executives responsible for customer-facing operations and product development grew up inside the brand. The executive responsible for manufacturing consistency came from the parent company’s quality apparatus.
This approach mirrors tensions competitors face in different ways. Ferrari guards its independence fiercely despite being publicly listed, while McLaren has cycled through ownership structures that sometimes disrupted operational continuity. Lamborghini’s VW Group membership gives it a structural advantage in areas like quality systems, supplier access, and platform sharing (the Urus rides on the same MLB Evo architecture as the Audi Q8 and Bentley Bentayga), but the risk is always that group processes smother the brand’s distinctiveness. The 2015 appointments suggest Lamborghini was conscious of that tension and calibrated accordingly.
One broader observation worth noting: Stephan Winkelmann, who oversaw these appointments, departed for Audi in early 2016 before returning to lead Lamborghini again in 2020. According to one report, vehicle sales grew 300 percent during his combined tenures. The management team he assembled in September 2015 was part of the infrastructure that sustained that growth even through the CEO transition to Stefano Domenicali and back.
For buyers and enthusiasts tracking the brand today, the practical takeaway is straightforward. Lamborghini’s current product quality, its commercial reach, and the pace at which new models arrive are not accidents. They trace back to deliberate organizational decisions made years before the cars themselves appeared. The 2015 reshuffle was one of those decisions, and its effects remain visible in every Revuelto rolling off the line in Sant’Agata.
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