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Ferruccio Lamborghini

Ferruccio Lamborghini was born on april 25th 1916 as a farmer son in Renazzo, a little village north of Bologna. When he grow up he was interested in all sorts of machine's, and, like most young Italians in these days, he was fascinated by fast cars. His parents recognized his interest in technical things and let him go to Bologna where he got his degree in Industrial Design. After his study he started as a trainee at a metal workshop. During the second world- war he was stationed on Rhodos (Greece) at a transport unit. He was the one that kept all the vehicles moving. After the war he went back to Renazzo and went on with his civilian life. In this farmer community was a real need for tractors, but after the war they were very hard to find. No problem for Ferruccio: he built one himself from scrap-iron. All the farmers in the neighborhood saw the thing and they all would like to have one, so he bought a few light armored cars from the British Army, and converted them into a carioch (= little tractor). He was not the only one that builded carioches so he had to find a way to sell them. On market day he took his carioch to the marketplace and challenged the other makers for a pull-duel...most times he won. His first factory was established in 1949 in Cento. After three years he stopped building carioches and started producing new tractor's with Diesel-engines of his own design, in a few years his name was established, and he was the biggest tractor producer of Italy.
In 1960 he started a second company, this company produced heating and cooling equipment, in a few years it was a big success, he even was decorated with the Cavaliere del Lavaro by the president of Italy. So, in 1962, he had no worry's about money... He liked sport cars and owned a few Farrari's, a Morgan, a Mercedes-Benz, a Jaguar and a few more. The story goes (We don't know if it is true) that he had some problems with one of his Ferrari's and went to the Maranello factory to complain about it. They said to him : You don't know nothing about cars, you better drive a tractor. So he decided to built a better car by himself. If it's true, we'll never know, but the fact is that he started working on it in 1962... He contracted Giotto Bizzarrini (who designed ferrari's 250 GTO engine) to design the engine, in 1963 the engine was finished, it was much more advanced than the 250 GTO engine, it had twin camshafts on every row of cilinder s and produced 360 Hp. So, the Lamborghini-story could start... The engine was built in his tractor-factory, but his completely new car factory was built in Sant'Agata Bolognese, only a few kilometers from Ferrari's factory in Modena. The plant was 46000 square meters and one of the most modern car factory's in the world. In 1970 Lamborghini was one of the last independent car manufacturers ( Ferrari was taken over by Fiat in 1969), business was not going well and his son Antonio was not interested in running the factory. In 1972 he decided to sell 51% of his stock to Rosetti, and later that year he sold the rest to Leimer, he ran the factory for them until 1974 when he left the company and started producing wine. Today it's one of Italy's biggest wine producers with over 900.000 bottles a year. He builded a golf-course and rumours say that he was involved in the restart of the famous Bugatti, but that's never been confirmed. Sadly this great man is no longer with us, he died on 20 february 1993.