Lamborghini Murciélago

The raging bull..

The Lamborghini Murciélago is a sports car produced by Italian automaker Lamborghini. It is often referred to as a supercar and is Lamborghini’s flagship and the halo car of the automaker’s lineup. The Murciélago is a high-performance two-door, two-seat coupé, powered by an evolution of the Lamborghini V12 engine. A roadster version of the car was introduced in 2004.

The Murciélago was introduced in 2001 for the 2002 model year as the successor to the famed Diablo supercar, and was the automaker’s first new design in eleven years, as well as the first under the ownership of German automaker Audi. The Murciélago was styled by Peruvian-born Belgian Luc Donckerwolke, Lamborghini’s head of design from 1998 to 2005

Name

In a continuation of Lamborghini’s tradition of giving its cars names from the world of bullfighting, the Murciélago was named for a fighting bull that survived 28 sword strokes in an 1879 fight against Rafael “El Lagartijo” Molina Sanchez, at the Coso de los califas bullring in Córdoba, Spain. Murciélago fought with such passion and spirit that the matador chose to spare its life, a rare honor. The bull, which came from Joaquin del Val di Navarra’s farm, was later presented as a gift to Don Antonio Miura, a noted local breeder; thus began the famed Miura line of fighting bulls, which provided the name for one of Lamborghini’s first great cars.

Murciélago is the Spanish name for the bat. The word is pronounced [murθiˈelaɣo], with a voiceless dental fricative [θ] (as in English thing), in the Castilian Spanish spoken in most of Spain. However, the Italian automaker often uses the Southern Spain and Latin American Spanish pronunciation, [mursiˈelaɣo], with an [s] sound.