Ferruccio Elio Arturo Lamborghini (Italian pronunciation: [fɛrˈruttʃo lambɔrˈgini]; April 28, 1916 – February 20, 1993) was an Italian industrialist. Born to grape farmers from the comune of Cento in the Emilia-Romagna region, his mechanical know-how led him to enter the business of tractor manufacturing in 1948, when he founded Lamborghini Trattori, which quickly became an important manufacturer of agricultural equipment in the midst of Italy’s post-war economic reform. In 1959, he opened an oil heater factory, Lamborghini Bruciatori, which later entered the business of producing air conditioningequipment. In 1963, he most famously created Automobili Lamborghini, a maker of high-end sports cars in Sant’Agata Bolognese. Lamborghini founded a fourth company, Lamborghini Oleodinamica in 1969. Lamborghini sold off many of his interests by the late 1970s and retired to an estate in Umbria, where he pursued winemaking.Lamborghini’s increasing wealth allowed him to purchase faster, more expensive cars than the tiny Fiats he had tinkered with during his youth. He owned cars such as Alfa Romeos and Lancias during the early 1950s, and at one point, had enough cars to use a different one every day of the week, adding a Mercedes-Benz 300SL, a Jaguar E-Type coupé, and two Maserati 3500GTs. Of the latter, Lamborghini said, “Adolfo Orsi, then the owner of Maserati, was a man I had a lot of respect for: he had started life as a poor boy, like myself. But I did not like his cars much. They felt heavy and did not really go very fast.”In 1958, Lamborghini traveled to Maranello to buy a Ferrari 250GT, a two-seat coupé with a body designed by coachbuilderPininfarina. He went on to own several more over the years, including a Scaglietti-designed 250 SWB Berlinetta and a 250GT 2+2 four-seater.
Lamborghini thought Ferrari’s cars were good, but too noisy and rough to be proper road cars, categorizing them as repurposed track cars with poorly built interiorsLamborghini found that Ferrari’s cars were equipped with inferior clutches, and required continuous trips to Maranello for rebuilds; technicians would secret the car away for several hours to perform the work, much to Lamborghini’s annoyance. He had previously expressed dissatisfaction with Ferrari’s aftersales service, which he perceived to be substandard.Lamborghini brought his misgivings to Enzo Ferrari’s attention, but was dismissed by the notoriously pride-filledModenan. After successfully modifying one of his personally-owned Ferrari 250GTs to outperform stock models, Lamborghini gained the impetus to pursue an automobile manufacturing venture of his own, aiming to create the perfect touring car that he felt no one could build for him.Lamborghini believed that a grand tourer should have attributes that were lacking in Ferrari’s offerings, namely high performance without compromising tractability, ride quality, and interior appointments. A clever businessman, Lamborghini also knew that he could make triple the profit if the components used in his tractors were installed in a high-performance exotic car instead.