Meet the One-off Lamborghini Diablo With a 1,000-Horsepower Bugatti Engine in Back
The Piëch family’s supercar collection is enough to make any Bugatti fan swoon. It ranges from one of just six of the huge Bugatti Royale limousines (1926-1933) to two custom-commissioned Chiron-based one-offs (the La Voiture Noire and Hommage), which most sold for over $10 million. But in the middle of the Bugatti room is one random Lamborghini Diablo. Why? It has a huge secret under the hood.
The bizarre story of the Lamborghatti
When engineers are working on a new vehicle, the power plant team needs a way to test the engine. So how would you test the legendary quad-supercharged 1,000-horsepower W16 that would power the mid-engine Veyron and Chiron? If you’re the Y2K era Volkswagen Group, you just drop it in a bright yellow Lamborghini Diablo.
The resulting Frankencar is truly diabolical. The engineers had to modify the car heavily to allow the four huge turbochargers to breathe. The thing is all intakes and exhaust.
My absolute favorite part of the Lamborghatti is what appears to be an oil cooler box next to the engine which wears a Bugatti logo. Its surface features an “engine turning” design which was a signature of the original cars Ettore Bugatti sold until the early 1950s.
So what is this monstrous, 1,000-horsepower Lamborghini doing in the Piëch collection? Ferdinand Karl Piëch, the grandson of Ferdinand Porsche, was the Volkswagen executive who pushed to purchase the Bugatti name and engineer a 1,000-horsepower, million-dollar hypercar. You can see the test mule Lambo for yourself in the video embedded below:
