What Plebeian Car Would You Swap This Lamborghini Racing Engine Into?
Because powering a Corolla is still better than being turned into a coffee table.
Scour the car-internet long enough and you'll find plenty of neat automobilia for sale. Racing parts and even whole race cars are, of course, some of the coolest classified items, and you'll be surprised what you find more often than not. Take this race-used 5.2-liter V10 from a Lamborghini Huracan GT3 Evo for example. Sure, you might not have a Huracan GT3 Evo of your own, but you could find some use for it, right?
Facebook user Tullio Mateo Maria has the engine up for sale in Italy, where its former racing team owners are based. The V10 came out of a GT3 car used by Lazarus Racing, who until recently raced Lamborghinis across Europe. The team apparently passed the engine along to Maria's father as partial payment for work performed, but before that, it was used in the International GT Open Series and Blancpain GT Series. It’s likely that all of its claimed 7,000 kilometers were done at a frantic clip, totaling roughly 4,350 miles of hard living. Even so, Lamborghini's specs for the Huracan GT3 Evo are impressive. The 5.2-liter features all the must-haves for competitive duty like dry-sump lubrication and an adjustable rev-limiter, and the engine is most effective when wrung out at high RPMs.
Unfortunately for those of us without corporate sponsors or old money, the engine was designed exclusively for use with a six-speed sequential gearbox. If you automatically thought "that doesn't sound cheap," you'd be right. Racing transmissions like the Hör unit found in the Huracan GT3 cars are hard to find and can cost well over $20,000. That can more than triple the cost of buying the engine alone, but it's still much cheaper than calling Lamborghini to buy your own GT3 car, which costs over half-a-million dollars.
The Lazarus racing team used Lamborghinis up until this year, when the team made the switch to compete with a pair of Bentley Continental GT3s. Last year, the team fielded three drivers to pilot its Huracan GT3 Evo for the Blancpain GT Series Endurance Cup, and it's possible that this engine was involved in that series.
It'll cost you €10,000, or about $11,363, to walk away with the engine, but a cheap beater will only take a fraction of that. So, what's your pick?
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