Vallelunga Delivers a Penultimate Round for the History Books
Fifty Huracán Super Trofeo EVO2 race cars lined up on the Vallelunga grid for the penultimate round of the 2023 Lamborghini Super Trofeo Europe season on November 12, matching the series record first set at Spa in 2016. Across four races, six different crews took victories. When the checkered flags fell, every championship in every class remained unresolved, setting up a finale at the same circuit the following week that could hardly have been scripted more dramatically.
A one-make championship lives or dies on participation. When the entry list swells to 50 identical cars in the series’ sixteenth year, the racing gets tighter, the talent pool deepens, and the whole enterprise becomes impossible to dismiss as a gentleman’s diversion. Lamborghini’s Squadra Corse division runs three continental Super Trofeo championships (Europe, Asia, and North America), with the European series functioning as the flagship. A record-tying grid at Vallelunga is a concrete signal that customer demand for Lamborghini’s racing ladder remains strong, even as the Huracán platform approaches the end of its competitive life.
The initially scheduled Imola round was postponed earlier in the season, prompting the addition of a standalone Vallelunga event immediately before the World Finals. That compressed calendar added urgency to every overtake and every points finish, because the margin for recovery had evaporated. The result was a weekend where the sheer depth of the grid turned every class battle into a genuine thriller, and the championship picture only grew murkier with each race.
A fleet of Lamborghini Huracán Super Trofeo EVO2 race cars lines up on the starting grid, ready for the race.
The Huracán Super Trofeo EVO2: Why the Racing Stays This Close
Six different winning crews from a field of 50 identical cars does not happen by accident. The Huracán Super Trofeo EVO2, introduced for 2022, is built around a 5.2-liter naturally aspirated V10 producing 620 horsepower, according to multiple reports. That engine, shared in various states of tune across the entire Huracán family, rewards throttle precision and corner speed rather than brute straight-line advantage.
Vallelunga demonstrated how well the EVO2 performs across wildly different skill levels. The same car that Mattia Michelotto used to build an 11-second gap in the Pro race also allowed Ibrahim Badawy, a solo Am driver, to execute a daring last-minute overtake for victory in his class. The aerodynamic refinements Lamborghini introduced with the EVO2, visible in the aggressive front splitter and prominent rear wing on every car in the field, keep the machines planted enough for amateurs to push hard while still rewarding the professionals who can extract the final tenth.
This balance is the quiet engineering achievement that rarely makes headlines but keeps 50 teams writing checks year after year. Rival one-make series from Ferrari and Porsche face the same design challenge: build a race car robust enough for paying customers yet sharp enough to produce genuine competition. The diversity of results across the Vallelunga grid suggests Lamborghini’s answer remains competitive, and it explains why every title fight stayed alive heading into the final week.
Two Lamborghini Huracán Super Trofeo EVO2 race cars battle on the track, with one spitting flames.
From Pro to LB Cup: The Drivers and Their Battles
Pro: VS Racing’s Michelotto and Gilles Stadsbader claimed their fourth win of the season in Race 1, a controlled performance from pole. Stadsbader acknowledged the pressure from BDR Competition’s Amaury Bonduel, who closed to within six seconds before a late safety car froze the order. Race 2 told a completely different story. Iron Lynx’s Rodrigo Testa de Sousa and Ugo de Wilde, who had endured a frustrating season of near-misses, finally converted pace into a result with a last-lap overtake on Andrzej Lewandowski after the Pole missed an apex at turn seven. Testa de Sousa’s post-race comments were refreshingly blunt:
“We are super happy with the win, after what feels like forever. I knew I was right there, and he missed the apex at turn seven and I had to just take my chance.”
De Wilde, watching from the pit wall, admitted he was more nervous off the car than on it. That kind of emotional investment is what separates a healthy racing series from a corporate hospitality exercise.
Brendon Leitch, the Pro championship leader, endured a nightmare Race 1 after opening-lap contact left him nursing a damaged car to seventh. He recovered brilliantly in Race 2, slicing from sixth on the grid to second and maintaining a 2.5-point championship lead heading into the finale.
Pro-Am: Lewandowski and Loris Spinelli (VSR) dominated, taking a pair of class victories and finishing third overall in Race 2. Lewandowski’s consistency throughout the season made him the clear favorite for the Pro-Am title, and Vallelunga only reinforced that position.
Am: The Am races produced the weekend’s most chaotic moments. Piergiacomo Randazzo and Giovanni Anapoli (VSR) won Race 1 after a wheel-banging first-lap duel with Badawy. Race 2 belonged to Badawy, who made a bold final-minute overtake on Julien Piguet despite briefly running across the grass at turn 11. That win gave Badawy a half-point championship lead, the slimmest margin in any class.
LB Cup: Jürgen Krebs (Leipert Motorsport) took two wins, but Paolo Biglieri and Petar Matić (Bonaldi Motorsport) maintained a seven-point cushion in the standings despite Biglieri’s costly spin in Race 1. The father-and-son Privitelio crew from Iron Lynx lurked 1.5 points further back, keeping the three-way fight alive.
Victorious drivers celebrate on the podium with their trophies and champagne after a successful race.
The Road to the World Finals: Championship Standings at a Glance
All four European titles remain undecided heading into the final round. The margins tell the story:
| Class | Leader | Gap |
|---|---|---|
| Pro | Brendon Leitch | 2.5 points |
| Pro-Am | Andrzej Lewandowski | Comfortable but unconfirmed margin |
| Am | Ibrahim Badawy | 0.5 points |
| LB Cup | Biglieri / Matić | 7 points over Krebs |
The final round and the traditional Lamborghini World Finals were scheduled for the same venue, Vallelunga, from November 14 to 17. The World Finals bring together drivers from all three continental championships to crown global champions, adding another layer of stakes. For the European contenders, the convenience of staying at the same circuit removed travel fatigue from the equation but did nothing to ease the pressure.
Leitch’s 2.5-point Pro advantage sounds comfortable until you consider that a single bad qualifying session or first-lap incident, exactly what happened to him in Race 1, can erase it entirely. Badawy’s half-point Am lead is essentially a coin flip. Only the LB Cup offered any breathing room, and even Biglieri and Matić could not afford complacency with Krebs on a winning streak. The compressed calendar meant that every driver who left Vallelunga with a points lead also left knowing how fragile that lead truly was.
Super Trofeo’s Strategic Role in Lamborghini’s Motorsport Future
Customer racing programs are expensive to run, and manufacturers do not sustain them out of charity. The Super Trofeo series, established in 2009, serves a specific function in Lamborghini’s ecosystem: it gives wealthy enthusiasts a structured, professionally managed environment to race identical cars, while simultaneously developing the team relationships, engineering feedback loops, and brand visibility that feed into higher-tier GT3 and GT4 competition.
The series also functions as an indirect sales channel. Enthusiasts who race Super Trofeo cars develop deeper brand loyalty, and teams that operate in the series often graduate to running Lamborghini machinery in international GT championships. With the Temerario GT3 confirmed as Lamborghini’s first fully in-house competition car, according to Autoblog, the Super Trofeo pipeline becomes even more relevant. The teams, mechanics, and drivers currently cutting their teeth on the Huracán EVO2 represent the natural customer base for whatever one-make platform Squadra Corse builds around the Temerario architecture.
The multi-class structure (Pro, Pro-Am, Am, and LB Cup) means the series accommodates everything from aspiring professionals to weekend competitors. Lamborghini has not published specific season costs, but the 50-car grid suggests the value proposition remains attractive enough to draw a full field in the series’ sixteenth year. Whether the Huracán-based format continues alongside a future Temerario one-make car, or transitions entirely, remains unannounced. What Vallelunga confirmed is that the current platform still delivers the kind of racing that keeps participants coming back, and that is the foundation any successor will need to match.
A blue and white Lamborghini Huracán Super Trofeo EVO2 race car blazes down the track.
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