‘Aventador was to be a pioneer, pure innovation’

Until now, PH Heroes have been cars rather than engineers. Here is the exception that deserves to break that rule. Maurizio Reggiani has just retired as Lamborghini’s head of motorsport after nearly 29 years at the company, 15 of those as development boss. During that time the company’s product line-up was transformed, along with its sales volumes. It was a renaissance that Reggiani very much led from the front. 

But Lamborghini isn’t the only highlight of his career. Before joining, Reggiani worked for both Maserati and the 1990s incarnation of Bugatti, where he led the development of the EB110’s quad-turbocharged V12. It’s not an exaggeration to say that no engineer has had more of an impact at the sharp end of the supercar industry. Which is why, late last year, I spent a day with Reggiani and pretty much a full set of the cars from his automotive CV, talking about the many highs and occasional lows of his long career. 

Like most graduate engineers, Reggiani started at the bottom – working for Maserati’s engine department after leaving university in 1982. “If you asked me that day what my dream was it was that maybe I would one day become responsible for the engines at Maserati – and that felt like an impossible dream.” His first assignment, having been handed a brand new set of overalls, was to strip down and rebuild one of the company’s V6s to get better acquainted with it. He did this as carefully as possible, believing the motor was going to be used in a customer’s car, only to be told once he had finished that it was a prototype engine destined for scrap.

Maserati was struggling for resources in the early ’80s, but it definitely didn’t lack ambition. The Bi-Turbo was one of the first cars in the world to use two turbochargers, this done to reduce lag, along with an innovative triple-valve head with the two intake valves opened by one tappet. But it had some major issues, too – the biggest being that, like many other early roadgoing turbo engines, it breathed through a carburettor. 

“It had to, because the Bosch fuel injection system was much too expensive for us to use,” Reggiani remembers, “so there was a closed box with the carburettor inside it, this pressurized by the turbos. Of course, the temperature inside the box grew quickly and what often happened was vapour lock – if the car stopped it was hard to restart.”

All of this had been created before Reggiani started at Maserati, but when the decision was made to switch to fuel injection – a new, less expensive Magnetti Marelli system – he was put in charge of making the new system work. It would be a career-defining experience. After five years at Maserati, Reggiani received a cryptic phone call. “They said ‘somebody gave your name’”, he remembers, “we need expertise with turbo engines for an important historical brand. But they were not allowed to tell me the name.”

Figuring this was the ’80s equivalent of vapourware, Reggiani politely declined to leave the security of Maserati. Soon afterwards he received another call, this one from Paulo Stanzani – Lamborghini’s original technical director and a legendary figure in the Italian supercar industry.  “I knew his fame, of course, and was flattered that he had called me personally. He said that they wanted me to come and I asked who is the company. He said ‘I can’t tell you, but you have to trust me.’”

Reggiani did, and thus became Bugatti Automobili S.p.A’s employee number two. Despite its historic name, acquired by entrepreneur Romano Artioli, the company was a clean-sheet start-up that was going to do pretty much everything from scratch. Reggiani was soon put in charge of the creation of the powertrain, with both a hugely complex quad-turbocharged 3.5-litre V12 plus an all-wheel drive system that would allow different amounts of torque to be sent to each end. His previous experience at Maserati was key, with the EB110 using what were effectively the same IHI turbos as in the Bi-Turbo.

“The issue we faced was that the turbos that would work for the proposed capacity created far too much lag for a sporty engine, even if we used two,” Reggiani explains, “based on this decision we decided to make three cylinders supply each turbo, and for the turbo to be as small as possible. The engine revved to 8,300rpm, and the turbos did not make a huge contribution at higher revs – but we still generated an output that surprised everybody.”

With 553hp, the EB110 was the most powerful road car in the world when it reached the market, although the McLaren F1 beat that number the following year. But the Bugatti still has superstar presence, and the chance to pore over the engine bay of an EB110 with a nostalgic Reggiani is a special one; we could easily have spent the whole day talking about just this one car – the intricate mechanical mechanism that operates the dozen individual throttle bodies is remembered as a particularly tough challenge. 

Reggiani says he learned a huge amount at Bugatti, where the culture was closer to a research laboratory than a corporate environment. That was true for lots of others, too: the EB110’s ABS system was the work of a young Bosch engineer called Dieter Gass, who later rose to be Audi’s head of motorsport. But the pioneering spirit wasn’t matched by sales success, and as it became obvious Bugatti was heading towards the ground, Reggiani was forced to look for alternatives.

One offer was to move to Ferrari to work on the company’s Formula 1 engines, a fascinating path not taken after they couldn’t agree on terms. The other, which Reggiani admits felt less exciting at the time, was Lamborghini. “It was an old company at the time, and a very traditional one – the complete opposite to Bugatti,” he says, “we always had to use what was always existing, we tried to make something new without changing anything. There was no money, no resource, we had to achieve the maximum with the minimum. I remember that after one year thinking I have taken the wrong decision.”

Work had already begun on what was known as Project 147, a proposed replacement for the ageing Diablo which was going to be based around the VT 6.0-litre’s engine. Alongside that plans were being formed for a second, smaller model – one that would have profound consequences on Lamborghini’s future.  “The idea was to have a smaller car based around an existing powertrain,” Reggiani says, “so we started to investigate options, to scout what already existed on the market. We looked at BMW and Ford but soon realised the best for us was the powertrain from the Audi A8, because it was all-wheel drive and we could turn it around 180 degrees.”

Reggiani was part of the small team dispatched to Ingolstadt to ask for a supply deal for the V8 with Audi’s then-CEO Franz-Josef Paefken and engineering head Ulrich Hackenberg. These discussions dragged on, then took an unexpected direction. “We arrived at the Detroit motor show in 1998 and I met Hackenberg and asked if they had finally decided. He said ‘Maurizio, we have an offer – but there is one condition, that Audi buys Lamborghini’.”

Lamborghini’s then-Indonesian ownership was already looking to offload the company and a deal was done just six months later. The day after the contract was signed Paefken and Volkswagen uberboss Ferdinand Piech arrived in Sant’Agata for a full run-down on everything Lamborghini was working on. Reggiani was effectively pitching for his job, as well as the company’s future – every other Volkswagen Group subsidiary’s technical head was German. But he managed to persuade his new bosses of his vision, although – ironically – the plan to use the Audi V8 which had led to the union was cancelled after Piech insisted the baby car should get a purpose-built engine.

Which brings us to more familiar territory. Work on what would become the V12 Murcielago and V10 Gallardo went on in parallel, with Lamborghini able to call on Volkswagen’s engineering resources while ensuring the cars would still have a uniquely Italian character. “One of the targets was, obviously, to use as much as possible from the group that can be hidden, but to customise the dynamic behaviour,” Reggiani remembers, “a blower motor or a filter, it doesn’t matter – and that’s the same logic for Bentley, SEAT and Skoda… but we accepted for powertrain we had to be unique.” The result was hugely successful. Lamborghini sold 4,099 Murcielagos in nine years; it had taken over two decades to sell 2,903 Diablos. And by the time the Gallardo retired in 2012 the total production run of 12,000 cars represented more than half of all the Lamborghinis that had been made up to that point. 

But it is the Aventador that Reggiani will always remember as the highest point of his career. The new supercar’s development began just after he had been promoted to become Lamborghini’s Chief Technical Officer, and while the company’s previous mid-engined V12s had all been evolutionary steps, the Aventador was a revolution.  “There was an easy path we could follow, with carry-over parts and ideas,” he says, “but the Aventador was always to be a pioneer, it was pure innovation.” The Aventador would get a carbon fibre monocoque, one that Lamborghini developed with the help of Boeing’s experience in creating the structure of the 787 Dreamliner; it also got pushrod suspension to save space and the ultra-fast ISR (Independent Shifting Rod) gearbox. Interestingly, Reggiani says that it would have been possible to follow the supercar herd and use a double-clutch gearbox, but this was discounted on the grounds of weight and packaging.

“What we did with my team is one of the most iconic V12s ever built, both within Lamborghini but also the wider landscape of the super sportscar market,” Reggiani says, “if you ask me which car I am proudest of, I will always say this one… I think I was very lucky to have my job in the most iconic time of the super sports car with the thermodynamic engine. I know this is an era that will soon be over.”

Not that everything has gone according to plan. Reggiani admits he views the decision not to build a production version of the Lamborghini Asterion PHEV concept that was shown at the 2014 Paris motor show as a missed opportunity. “That car was so far ahead of the rest of the world at the time, a Lamborghini with both a PHEV system and a V12 engine. It was super cool and the reaction from almost everybody was ‘wow’, but the core technology was viable and I was pressing hard for us to make it,” he says, “we could have been fish swimming in a blue ocean, by ourselves and without competition.” Of course, the car that did ultimately become Lambo’s third model line – the Urus SUV – has also become the company’s greatest hit in terms of sales and almost certainly profits. So there’s a big swing next to that roundabout.

The significance of Reggiani’s career was acknowledged last year when he was given an honorary doctorate in mechanical engineering by the University of Bologna, the first time that honour has been bestowed on anybody since Enzo Ferrari. But despite that, and a career spent in the supercar stratosphere, Reggiani’s automotive tastes remain impressively grounded: now his company Urus has been returned, his daily driver is an original Land Rover Defender.