3 Awesome RWD Lamborghinis That Make Us Excited About The New Rear-Drive Huracan

Those who have accused the Lamborghini Huracan of being a bit too soft and a bit too easy going will soon get something a little more satisfactory to silence them. Yep, the Gallardo successor is going rear-wheel drive for a spicy special edition, and according to a report in Autocar, it’ll make its debut at the 2015 LA motor show, which kicks off in just over a week.

Why is this the big deal? Well, in the early 1990s, Sant’Agata Bolognese started to make the transition to producing all-wheel drive vehicles, to the point at which the company made almost nothing of the two-wheel drive variety. But it’s that ‘almost’ bit which is key: there were a few exceptions, and they were exceptional.

1. Diablo GT

Arriving in 1993, the all-wheel drive Diablo VT was a clear indicator of Lamborghini’s future direction when it came to drive layouts. But that wasn’t the end of rear-drive Lambos: the standard Diablos remained very much two-wheel drive affairs until their discontinuation in 1998, and it was the same case for the SVs, which stopped production a year later. The one we’re looking at though, is the GT, of which only 80 were built in 1999.

A rather more serious prospect than the SV, the GT received a whole host of angry additions including a new front splitter and rear diffuser, a wider front track with flared arches to match, a big rear spoiler and the mother of all roof scoops. Oh, and for good measure, the 5.7-litre V12 grew to to 6.0 litres thanks to an increase in stroke, giving a total output of 572bhp.

Take a look inside the body - mostly made of carbonfibre - and you’ll find a stripped-back interior containing little else than a pair of bucket seats with four-point harnesses. Like I said, serious.

Lamborghini never made a road-going rear-drive Murcielago, but there were a few two-wheel drive race cars, created thanks to various sets of motorsport regulations. The first was the R-GT.

Actually less powerful than its road-going cousin due to the fitment of air restrictors (that’s the regulations at play again), it nevertheless sounds like the devil in a bad mood, as the video above will show you. It weighs 1100kg - a hefty cut over the road version’s 1650kg figure - and was built by Reiter Engineering with assistance from Audi Sport.

3. Gallardo LP550-2 Balboni

There’s a reason we had to sandwich a race car between the Diablo and this machine: once production of the SV and GT ended, Lamborghini didn’t produce another rear-wheel drive motor until the Gallardo LP550-2 Valentino Balboni, which said its screaming V10 hello in 2009.

There were other versions of the LP550-2 sold in the following years, but it’s the Balboni edition that sticks in our head, simply because of the bloke it’s named after. When this former Lamborghini test driver retired in 2008, he’d been with the company an astonishing 40 years. Since Valentino’s preference was for power to be deployed at the rear of the cars he was driving, slapping his name on a rear-driven version of a previously all-wheel drive-only supercar seems like a very fitting send-off.

Interestingly, despite being limited to 250 units, the Balboni became the entry-level Gallardo, thanks to having a lower price than the LP560-4 and - as you gathered from that missing 10 between the two designations - 10bhp less from the 5.2-litre V10. The differences go further than that, though, as extensive changes where made under the skin to deal for the switch to RWD. The springs, dampers and tyres were all changed, and even the aero package was tweaked slightly.