Ferrucio Lamborghini, also hailing from the Emilia Romagna region of Italy, was an engineer who created his wealth by building agricultural machinery, mainly tractors. Like many wealthy middle-aged gentlemen of the time, he rewarded himself with the purchase of two shiny new sports cars, which happened to be a black and a white Ferrari for him and his wife. Ferrucio was not impressed with some of the cars’ mechanical aspects, most notably the clutch. He relayed this information as “constructive criticism” to Enzo Ferrari when the two happened to meet by chance to which Ferrari replied, “You are a tractor driver, a farmer, you shouldn’t complain about my cars because they are the best in the world!”.
Lamborghini obviously took this quite personally and from this point made it his mission to build a sports car which would rival the best that Ferrari could deliver and in 1963 he founded his company, with the 350GT being the first model that was launched in the mid-60s. The rest, as they say, is history.
