Background
After serving as a mechanic in the Regia Aeronautica during WW2, Ferruccio Lamborghini set up a small car and motorcycle repair shop near Modena before branching out into the manufacture of tractors using surplus military hardware and, initially, Morris engines.
Within a few years tractor production was up to 200 units a week and the war surplus had pretty much run out.
In 1957 Lamborghini launched the range that remained closest to the founder’s heart - the ‘Lamborghinetta’, which was powered by an in-house designed and built 2-cylinder engine.
These little tractors were economical, powerful and reliable and would prove ideal for light agricultural users such as viticulturists.
By the mid-1950s Lamborghini Trattori SpA of Cento, near Bologna, had become one of the largest agricultural equipment manufacturers in Italy, a happy state of affairs that no doubt prompted Lamborghini's declaration, “A tractor a day keeps the misery away!”
Flush with cash from his success in tractors and air conditioners, and following an argument with Enzo Ferrari about an unsatisfactory clutch in his recently purchased Ferrari 250GT, Ferruccio decided to start building his own luxury cars in 1963.
The Lamborghini 226R, of which we have an immaculate example here today, is a model with a very special story.
Legend has it that Ferruccio commissioned Hurth of Bolzano, a company that specialised in tractor gearboxes, to design a prototype gearbox and rear axle.
Inspired by what he saw of the first prototypes, Ferrucio began developing a very similar version in-house for use in his own tractors.
Not unreasonably, when Hurth learned of this they threatened Lamborghini with legal action for design infringement unless he purchased 200 Hurth units.
Thus obligated, Lamborghini launched a new compact model equipped with the Hurth rear axle. To keep costs low, he used leftover parts from the 1R that weren’t needed for the newer 230R series.
And so it came to pass that just 200 Lamborghini 226Rs were created between 1967 and 1970.
Lamborghini Trattori is still in business and building tractors today.
The well-known Cotswold farmer, lager salesman and publican Jeremy Clarkson has one.
When Ferruccio died in 1993 fans might have expected his final journey to have been made atop one of the marque’s fire-breathing V12 supercars.
Instead, and entirely appropriately, it was a ‘Lamborghinetta’ tractor that carried Ferruccio’s coffin to the cemetery in Sant’ Agata Bolognese.
