Racing and Champagne at Circuit of The Americas
Lamborghini opened its 2017 Super Trofeo North America season at Circuit of The Americas with a weekend built to serve two audiences at once: the drivers chasing championship points on Austin’s 3.4-mile circuit, and the dealer clients watching from behind velvet ropes with hot lap rides still ringing in their ears. Richard Antinucci swept both races in dominant fashion, leading every lap of the doubleheader. Yet the race results, impressive as they were, functioned as the centerpiece of a broader exercise in brand theater.
Lamborghini extended world-class hospitality to clients and guests of its dealers throughout the weekend, offering the IMSA Hot Lap Experience: high-speed passenger rides around the full COTA layout in a Lamborghini. For a manufacturer that sells roughly 3,500 cars a year globally, these trackside weekends represent something more calculated than a simple racing series. They are curated introductions to the brand’s performance credentials, aimed squarely at prospective buyers and existing owners who might otherwise never see a Lamborghini pushed to its engineering limits.
Ferrari and Porsche run their own one-make customer racing programs, and both wrap their events in comparable hospitality. Lamborghini’s approach with the Super Trofeo sits between these two poles: smaller and more intimate than Porsche’s operation, more accessible than Ferrari’s invitation-only upper tiers, and directly tied to its dealer network in a way that keeps the sales funnel short. A client watching from the hospitality suite at COTA can walk back to their local Lamborghini dealer on Monday morning and talk about what they saw. That proximity is the point.
Antinucci’s Flag-to-Flag Authority
Richard Antinucci, the 2015 Super Trofeo North America Pro Driver Champion, left no ambiguity about who owned the COTA weekend. Driving the No. 16 Change Racing entry representing Lamborghini Carolinas, he converted pole position into a flag-to-flag victory in Race 2, mirroring his Race 1 performance. Maximum points from two starts, every lap led. For a driver who arrived at COTA with no prior practice sessions with his new team, the results were striking.
“You think a guy with experience doesn’t need it, but that’s not true. You always need to dial in and adjust with a new team. Change Racing has been awesome.”
That quote reveals something worth noting about the Super Trofeo format. Because every car in the field runs the same Huracán Super Trofeo specification, the series compresses the performance window. Victories come down to driver skill, team preparation, and the ability to extract consistency from a shared platform. When a veteran like Antinucci praises his team’s car preparation rather than any engineering advantage, he is describing the fundamental character of one-make racing: the machinery is equalized, so the human element decides everything.
With hungry younger talent already close behind, Antinucci’s early-season dominance established a benchmark rather than a foregone conclusion. The championship would visit five more circuits across North America and conclude at Imola, Italy, for the World Finals, where drivers from the European, Asian, and North American series converge for a single event.
Class Winners and the Series’ First All-Female Pairing
The overall results told only part of the story. Lamborghini’s Super Trofeo splits its field into Pro, Pro-Am, Am, and LB Cup categories, allowing gentleman drivers and less experienced competitors to race for meaningful hardware within their own classifications. This tiered structure is one of the series’ quiet strengths: it keeps the grid populated with a mix of professionals and passionate amateurs, all running identical machinery.
Edoardo Piscopo and Taylor Proto, sharing the No. 50 US RaceTronics entry for Lamborghini Beverly Hills, claimed second overall and the Pro-Am class victory in Race 2 after starting twelfth. Proto gained six positions before handing the car to Piscopo during a mid-race caution, and the Italian driver completed the charge with a late pass on Riccardo Agostini’s No. 1 Prestige Performance car. That kind of recovery drive, from the back half of the grid to the overall podium, is exactly the sort of action that makes these weekends compelling for the hospitality guests watching from above pit lane.
Brian Thienes won the Am class after climbing from twentieth on the grid to sixth overall in his No. 17 US RaceTronics entry. J.C. Perez took the LB Cup victory for DAC Motorsports, representing Lamborghini Palm Beach, after using a well-timed pit stop to leapfrog his class rivals.
Pippa Mann and Jackie Heinricher earned a third-place Pro-Am finish as the series’ first all-female driver pairing, competing in the No. 57 Prestige Performance entry for Lamborghini Paramus. For a series that depends on broadening its participant base to sustain grid numbers and commercial viability, milestones like this carry weight beyond the result sheet. Every new demographic that sees itself represented on the grid is a potential future customer for both the racing program and the road cars that fund it.
The Huracán Super Trofeo: Road Car DNA in a Roll Cage
Every car on the COTA grid shared the same fundamental architecture, and that architecture traces directly back to the Huracán showroom model. The Super Trofeo is powered by the V10 direct injection engine found in the road car, managed by a MoTeC control unit that enables a maximum output of 620 horsepower. The frame retains the road car’s hybrid carbon/aluminum construction, though with modified geometries to accommodate an improved front radiator and a racing gearbox at the rear, changes that also contribute to enhanced aerodynamics.
This engineering lineage is not incidental. It is the commercial logic of the entire program. When Lamborghini demonstrates that its V10 can survive a full season of customer racing, with drivers of wildly varying skill levels pushing it through kerbs and gravel traps at circuits from Austin to Imola, the implicit message to road car buyers is clear: the engine in your Huracán was built to tolerate far worse than anything you will encounter on a Sunday drive through the Hill Country.
The Huracán Super Trofeo is a dedicated race car, generally not street-legal, stripped of creature comforts and fitted with a full roll cage, racing suspension, and slick tires. But the core of the machine, the naturally aspirated V10 and the carbon/aluminum tub, remains recognizably the same platform that sits in dealer showrooms. Later iterations would include the Super Trofeo EVO and EVO2, refining the aerodynamics and electronics while preserving that fundamental road-to-race connection.
For anyone considering a Huracán purchase, or already owning one, the Super Trofeo series serves as a rolling endurance test. According to Autoblog, the Huracán platform evolved through multiple track-focused variants during its production run, from the Performante to the STO to the dedicated race cars. The Super Trofeo sits at the extreme end of that spectrum, but the technology flows in both directions.
Where the Super Trofeo Fits in Lamborghini’s Larger Motorsport Arc
The Super Trofeo Europe series was established in 2009 using the Gallardo platform, and the program expanded to North America and Asia in subsequent years. By 2017, Squadra Corse, Lamborghini’s motorsport division, was operating three continental championships that culminated in a single World Finals event. The structure gave Lamborghini a global racing presence that punched well above the brand’s relatively modest production volume.
Viewed from the vantage point of Lamborghini’s current trajectory, the 2017 COTA weekend sits at an interesting inflection point. The Huracán was succeeded by the plug-in hybrid Temerario in 2024, and the Temerario GT3 marks Lamborghini’s first competition car fully designed, developed, and built in-house. One report from Autoblog indicates Lamborghini plans to introduce a Temerario Super Trofeo car for all three one-make series in 2027, which would end the Huracán’s long reign as the series’ sole platform.
That transition will force every customer team in the paddock to adapt to a fundamentally different powertrain philosophy. The naturally aspirated V10 that defined the Huracán Super Trofeo’s character, its linear power delivery and that unmistakable high-rpm scream, will give way to a twin-turbocharged V8 with hybrid assistance. Whether the new car can replicate the visceral appeal that made the Huracán series so popular with both drivers and spectators remains an open question.
For prospective participants and fans of the series, the practical takeaway is straightforward: the Huracán-era Super Trofeo cars represent the final chapter of Lamborghini’s naturally aspirated customer racing program. Cars from this period, particularly low-mileage examples, are already attracting collector interest. Autoblog reported on a Super Trofeo EVO with just 84 miles listed for sale, highlighting how these race cars are beginning to transition from competition tools to collectible artifacts of a specific engineering era.
The next round of the 2017 championship was scheduled for June 28 through July 1 at Watkins Glen International, running alongside the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship. What the COTA weekend made clear is that the Super Trofeo operates as something more sophisticated than a racing series. It is a dealer engagement tool, a technology proving ground, and a brand experience platform, all wrapped in the sound of twenty-odd naturally aspirated V10s echoing off the COTA observation tower.
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