Two Wins, Two Titles: Lamborghini’s 2018 GT Open Finale in Barcelona
The 2018 International GT Open season reached its final round at Barcelona’s Montmeló Circuit in October, and Lamborghini’s customer teams turned the weekend into a showcase of the Huracán GT3’s depth. Ombra Racing and Imperiale Racing split the two race victories between them, Imperiale locked down the Teams’ championship, and the AM class title went to a Lamborghini crew as well. Two victories and two titles from a single weekend: for a brand that once treated factory motorsport as an afterthought, the results confirmed that Squadra Corse’s customer racing model was delivering.
Andrea Rizzoli and Damiano Fioravanti took the first GT Open victory of the year aboard the #12 Ombra Racing Huracán GT3 in Race 1, finishing ahead of Giovanni Venturini and Jeroen Mul in the #63 Imperiale Racing entry. A Lamborghini one-two on Saturday, with Stefano Costantini in the #91 Target Racing car holding first in the AM class. Race 2 belonged to Imperiale Racing’s Riccardo Agostini and Rik Breukers in the #25 car, a result Lamborghini described as their well-earned final win of the season. Lewandowski and Borlenghi clinched the AM title with a third-place finish, while Costantini doubled his Saturday result with another AM class win on Sunday.
The overall 2018 GT Open championship went to Mikkel Mac, according to independent reporting on the season’s final standings. Lamborghini did not take the overall drivers’ crown, but the depth of its customer entries, the Teams’ title for Imperiale Racing, and the AM championship painted a picture of a manufacturer whose privateer network could fight across every class simultaneously.
The Huracán GT3: A Proven Platform for Global Customer Racing
Barcelona told only part of the story. Lamborghini’s 2018 release also highlighted results from the other side of the world. Kimiya Sato and Yuya Motojima took second place at Autopolis in the Japanese Super GT GT300 class with the #87 Legal Frontier Lamborghini. In Shanghai, CJ Huang reinforced his lead in the China GT Championship GTC class by winning round 11.
What connected all of these results was the Huracán GT3 itself. By 2018, the car was proving remarkably adaptable across different regulatory environments and climates. A privateer team in Japan, a gentleman driver in China, young professionals in European GT racing: the same basic platform served all of them. That kind of versatility does not happen by accident. It requires a manufacturer to invest in reliability, parts supply chains, and engineering support that extends well beyond the factory gates in Sant’Agata.
For enthusiasts who follow the brand primarily through its road cars, the customer racing program is easy to overlook. Yet it functions as the proving ground for Lamborghini’s performance credibility. Every weekend a Huracán GT3 finishes a race without mechanical failure, it quietly validates the engineering philosophy behind the road car. The teams buying and running these machines are spending real money, and they keep coming back because the platform delivers.
Building a Legacy: How 2018’s Victories Shaped Lamborghini’s Motorsport Identity
Lamborghini’s motorsport ambitions in 2018 were still relatively young compared to Ferrari or Porsche, both of which could trace their GT racing lineage back decades. Squadra Corse was building its reputation one season at a time, and the 2018 GT Open results represented a critical mass of evidence: multiple teams, multiple series, multiple continents, all running Lamborghini hardware competitively.
That momentum carried forward. By 2024, one report indicates Lamborghini celebrated its 30th victory in the International GT Open series, achieved by the Oregon Team’s Jordan Pepper and Alessio Deledda at the Red Bull Ring. The Huracán GT3 EVO2 continued to attract new customer teams, with Villorba Corse announcing a multi-year partnership with Lamborghini and a return to GT Open competition using young drivers from the brand’s GT3 Junior Driver Program. The pipeline that the 2018 season helped establish, where success breeds team loyalty and team loyalty breeds more entries, remains active.
Customer teams do not stay loyal to manufacturers whose cars become uncompetitive or whose parts support dries up. The fact that evolved versions of the same car are still winning races years later suggests the original investment paid off. Lamborghini’s retention of teams like Imperiale Racing and the addition of new outfits speaks to the strength of the underlying program that weekends like Barcelona helped build.
From Huracán to Temerario: The Evolution of Lamborghini’s GT3 Program
The Huracán GT3’s competitive life will eventually end, and Lamborghini is already preparing its successor. The Temerario GT3, based on the twin-turbo V8 road car, represents the next-generation GT3 platform. For customer teams, this transition is significant. The Huracán GT3 was built around a naturally aspirated V10, and the shift to forced induction changes the character of the car fundamentally: different power delivery, different heat management requirements, different driving techniques under race conditions.
Lamborghini’s challenge is to make the Temerario GT3 as approachable and reliable for privateers as the Huracán proved to be. The 2018 Barcelona results and everything that followed give Squadra Corse a clear template: build a car that customer teams can trust over a full season, support it with parts and engineering, and let the results accumulate. The brand’s GT racing credibility now rests on whether it can replicate that formula with a turbocharged platform.
For Lamborghini enthusiasts watching from outside the paddock, the takeaway is straightforward. The company’s motorsport program is no longer a side project or a marketing exercise. It functions as a genuine competitive operation with a track record stretching back through the Huracán era to those 2018 victories at Montmeló and beyond. Whether the Temerario GT3 can sustain that momentum will say as much about Lamborghini’s engineering depth as any road car launch.
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