Racing and Road Cars Share the Sepang Spotlight
Lamborghini staged a telling double act at Sepang International Circuit in April 2017. The opening round of the Super Trofeo Asia Series ran alongside a customer car parade that rolled Aventadors and Diablos down the same pit lane where naturally aspirated V10 race cars were being prepped for battle. The pairing was deliberate, and it revealed the real purpose of the weekend: not just racing, but a carefully orchestrated exercise in binding owners, spectators, and prospective buyers to the brand through shared experience on hallowed tarmac.
Race Two on Sunday capped a schedule that also featured the Blancpain GT Series Asia, where Lamborghini Huracán GT3 entries competed, giving Malaysian spectators a full cross-section of the brand’s motorsport ladder in a single visit. The customer parade invited local owners to bring their cars onto the circuit, placing road machines alongside their stripped-out racing cousins. Diablos parked near Aventadors, classic V12 muscle beside modern V12 excess, all of it framed by the sound of Huracán Super Trofeo cars warming up in the background. For Lamborghini, this was community-building with a very specific commercial purpose, and the Sepang weekend offered the clearest window into how that purpose plays out across every class, every podium, and every paddock handshake.
Race Two: Clazzio Dominates, FFF Racing Recovers
Clazzio Racing locked out pole position for the second consecutive qualifying session, with Malaysian Squadra Corse Young Driver’s Program graduate Afiq Yazid and Japanese co-driver Cozzolino Kei looking composed from the start. X-One Racing Team’s Antonio D’Amico and Nicolas Costa improved to second on the grid, while Artur Janosz of Lazarus Racing and Meindert Van Buuren held third.
The race unfolded with the kind of mid-pack chaos that makes one-make series compelling. Costa dropped from the lead group to ninth after an unforced error on lap six, handing third to FFF Racing’s Richard Goddard. The compulsory pit window reshuffled the order when driver swaps brought fresh legs and fresh aggression. By lap fifteen, Yazid led Janosz and FFF Racing’s Armaan Ebrahim, a sequence that held through the checkered flag.
| Class | Winner | Team | Second | Third |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pro-Am | Afiq Yazid / Cozzolino Kei | Clazzio Racing | Artur Janosz (Lazarus) | Armaan Ebrahim (FFF Racing) |
| Am | Andrew Haryanto | X-One Racing Team | Sereethoranakul brothers (PSC Motorsports) | Chou & Chan (Top Speed Racing) |
| Lamborghini Cup | Bill Ng | Tedco Racing | Gabriele Murroni (Petri Corse) | Supachai Weeraborwornpong (Top Speed Racing) |
The Am and Lamborghini Cup classes produced their own stories. Andrew Haryanto repeated his Race One victory for X-One Racing Team, while Singapore’s Bill Ng climbed from fourteenth on the grid to win the Lamborghini Cup for Tedco Racing, overtaking Gabriele Murroni early and never looking back. Ng’s drive was the kind of determined performance that makes Cup classes worth watching: these are not professional racers, and the results reflect genuine competitive appetite from customers who bought into the program. That distinction matters, because it connects the on-track action directly to the community strategy Lamborghini was building around it.
A blue Lamborghini Huracán Super Trofeo EVO leads the pack during a thrilling race on the track.
Why Lamborghini Stages These Events (and Why It Matters in Asia)
Sepang was the first of six Super Trofeo Asia fixtures for 2017, with the season culminating at Imola for the World Final. That geographic arc tells you something about Lamborghini’s priorities. The Asian rounds put the brand’s motorsport operation in front of wealthy buyer pools across Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and beyond, markets where Lamborghini competes fiercely for attention with Ferrari and Porsche.
The customer car parade was not an afterthought bolted onto a race weekend. It was a calculated extension of the same strategy Lamborghini applies globally: use motorsport as a social anchor for owners. When a Diablo owner drives their car onto the Sepang grid alongside an Aventador, the brand reinforces something no showroom visit can replicate. It says: you belong to this. That sense of belonging translates directly into repeat purchases and referrals, which is why every major supercar manufacturer now runs some version of this playbook.
Media coverage of Super Trofeo Asia events frequently highlights the hospitality dimension, describing VIP access to garages, grid walks, and Italian catering as integral to the weekend. Forum and media accounts consistently describe the atmosphere as an “eye-opener into the world of customer racing,” suggesting Lamborghini succeeds in making the experience feel exclusive rather than corporate. For a brand selling cars that start well into six figures, that distinction is everything. The Sepang weekend showed that the racing itself, however thrilling, is only one layer of a deeper engagement model designed to keep owners emotionally invested long after the checkered flag falls.
The Huracán Super Trofeo: A Naturally Aspirated Racing Platform
The cars competing at Sepang in April 2017 were the Huracán Super Trofeo, a rear-wheel-drive, naturally aspirated V10 race machine that Lamborghini first introduced in 2014. These are not street-legal vehicles. They are purpose-built for the one-make series, stripped of road-car compromises and fitted with full roll cages, racing suspension, and aerodynamic packages designed for consistent lap-time performance rather than traffic-light drama.
Later in 2017, Lamborghini revealed the Huracán Super Trofeo EVO, an aerodynamic update that refined the platform further. The cars at this particular Sepang round would have been the earlier specification, though the underlying formula remained the same: a screaming naturally aspirated V10 in a lightweight, rear-drive chassis. That formula is becoming rarer in modern motorsport as manufacturers shift toward turbocharged and hybrid powertrains, which makes the Huracán Super Trofeo era feel increasingly significant in retrospect. It also explains why the sound of those cars warming up behind the customer parade carried a weight that went beyond spectacle. The V10 was the emotional thread tying the racing program to the road cars parked beside it.
For anyone considering the collector implications, Autoblog reported on a 2020 Huracán Super Trofeo EVO Collector edition with just 84 miles appearing on Bring a Trailer, highlighting the growing appreciation for these cars as artifacts of Lamborghini’s naturally aspirated golden age. The fact that low-mileage examples are already commanding collector attention suggests the market recognizes what these machines represent.
The Motorsport Ladder: From Super Trofeo to GT3 and Beyond
Lamborghini’s Squadra Corse division designed the Super Trofeo series as the entry point of a deliberate motorsport ladder. Drivers who prove themselves in the one-make championship gain the experience and credentials to step up to GT3 competition, where the Huracán GT3 competed in series like Blancpain (now rebranded). Afiq Yazid’s presence at Sepang as a Squadra Corse Young Driver’s Program graduate illustrates this pipeline in action: the program identifies talent, develops it within the controlled environment of Super Trofeo, and feeds it upward. His dominant Race Two performance was not just a result; it was a proof of concept for the entire development structure.
That pipeline matters more now than it did in 2017. Reports indicate the Temerario GT3 marks Lamborghini’s first entirely in-house designed and built competition car, a significant departure from the Huracán GT3 era when external partners handled much of the development. According to Autoblog, the Temerario GT3 debuted at the 2025 Goodwood Festival of Speed, signaling that Squadra Corse’s ambitions now extend well beyond customer racing weekends. The foundation built by series like Super Trofeo Asia, the driver development, the team relationships, the operational knowledge, feeds directly into that next chapter.
How Lamborghini’s Customer Racing Stacks Up Against Rivals
Ferrari runs its Challenge series. Porsche operates the Carrera Cup. Both are well-established customer racing programs with global footprints. Lamborghini’s Super Trofeo occupies a similar niche but with a different flavor, one that leans harder on the lifestyle and community dimensions.
The Sepang weekend illustrates the difference. Ferrari Challenge events are tightly run and professional, but they rarely incorporate the kind of mixed-era customer car parade that Lamborghini staged at Sepang. Porsche’s approach tends toward scale and accessibility, leveraging the sheer volume of 911 variants to fill grids. Lamborghini, with smaller production numbers and a more exclusive buyer demographic, uses events like Super Trofeo Asia to make each participant feel like part of a smaller, more rarefied club. The parade of Diablos and Aventadors alongside the race cars was not just a nice touch; it was the clearest expression of a philosophy that treats every owner as a stakeholder in the brand’s competitive identity.
Whether that approach generates better brand loyalty than Ferrari’s or Porsche’s programs is difficult to measure from the outside. Lamborghini does not publish retention or repeat-purchase data tied to motorsport participation. What the company does confirm is that the Super Trofeo series continues to expand, with the 2017 season spanning six rounds across Asia and Europe. For prospective buyers who value access to a genuine racing community, the Super Trofeo program offers a structured path from track-day curiosity to competitive racing, with the social infrastructure to match. Few competitors package the experience quite this way.
Sepang as a Starting Point
The 2017 Sepang round was, by design, an opening statement. Five more race weekends followed across Asia’s most prominent circuits before the season converged on Imola for the World Final. For teams like Clazzio Racing and X-One, the results at Sepang set the tone for championship campaigns. For Lamborghini as a brand, the weekend demonstrated that motorsport in Asia could serve a dual commercial function: competitive credibility and owner engagement, delivered simultaneously.
The Super Trofeo Asia series has continued to grow since 2017, and the Huracán platform that powered it has given way to a new generation. But the template established at events like this Sepang weekend persists. Race cars on track, road cars on the grid, owners in the paddock, and the unmistakable sound of naturally aspirated V10s binding all of it together. That formula worked in 2017. The question for Squadra Corse now is whether a twin-turbo V8 can generate the same emotional gravity when the Temerario era arrives in full.
