By now, we assume you’ll all know the tale of how Lamborghini came to be. As it goes, a tractor salesman by the name of Ferruccio Lamborghini was very unhappy with his Ferrari’s clutch, and after a heated debate with Enzo Ferrari, he decided to go and build his own perfect GT car.
How true that entirely is is up for debate, but there’s no doubting the success Lamborghini would go on to create. Today, you could argue that it’s the only supercar brand as well known as Ferrari in the mainstream consciousness.
Lamborghini 350 GT
What does a bull have to do with it, though? Though in its early tractor years, Lamborghini used a pretty bland-looking logo, Ferruccio opted to put the aggressive animal onto his cars from the very off.
There are a couple of reasons for this. Astrology plays a factor, with Ferruccio Lamborghini born on 28 April 1916. If you’re the star sign type, that makes him a taurus – represented by a bull. That, and the man himself was a fan of the Spanish tradition of bullfighting.
And so, the bull was chosen. The one used specifically on the Lamborghini logo from its inception as a car manufacturer through to this day is a bull from the Miura ranch in Seville, with Lamborghini taking inspiration following a visit in 1962.
As you may know, that wasn’t the end of Lamborghini and the fascination with bulls. Miura would become the name of its first supercar, and practically everything the manufacturer has produced since has taken a name from bullfighting.
The Islero was first named after a specific bull that killed matador Manolete in 1947. Diablo, Murcielago, Reventon, Aventador and Huracan all have similar stories behind them.
We can’t imagine those would’ve been quite as fierce-sounding if Lamborghini had been born a week earlier as an Aries…
