I don’t know about you, but when a tuning company takes a car that’s already quite fast and expensive and makes it even faster and more expensive, I tend to lose interest pretty quickly. However, something caught my eye about the Lamborghini Huracán-based Zyrus LP1200 Strada. I wonder what it could have been?
Of course, what I’m alluding to is the LP1200 Strada’s monstrous rear wing, which is so large it looks like it could comfortably seat two. But that wing is hardly the car’s only quality that could be described as monstrous.
As the name hints, Zyrus’ Huracán boasts 1,200 horsepower thanks to the addition of twin turbochargers to its 5.2-liter V10. Elsewhere, carbon-ceramic brakes, an Xtrac racing gearbox and Öhlins suspension are tasked with reining in those raging bulls and putting that power to good use. In total, the Norwegian engineering firm says it replaced more than 600 parts of the donor Huracán LP640-4 as part of the transformation.
Despite all of these track-minded enhancements and the mile-wide wing, the LP1200 Strada is street legal, just as advertised. Zyrus is making 12 of them, and at $732,000 they won’t even be quite as expensive as you might guess.
Back to that wing, though. I think the real reason the LP1200 Strada captured my attention is because the rear third reminds me of so many late ’90s GT1 cars, particularly ones like the McLaren F1 GTR Longtail that were lengthened with additional bodywork after having already raced for several years.
In this era, GT1 was a perfect mix of roadgoing hypercar and purpose-built prototype. If the class were still continuing today in a similar guise, cars like the LP1200 Strada, I have a hunch, are what we’d see bearing down the Mulsanne. And, since you’re asking — yeah, I’d be into that.
Incidentally, the timing for such a revival is just right, as we’re on the brink of two new top classes in global sports car racing, one of which is centered on hypercars that more closely evoke manufacturers’ production vehicles. In 2019, Lamborghini publicly flirted with the idea of sending a hypercar to compete for the overall win at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Then last June it trotted out the Essenza SCV12, which isn’t eligible for such racing but definitely looks as if it should be.
At this point, I wouldn’t bet on a factory-backed, global endurance program from Lamborghini. If nothing else, cars like the one Zyrus has built, and that SCV12, give us ideas of what such an effort might have looked like.