The lawn at The Quail this year looked like somebody raided a 1995 parts catalog. Gordon Murray rolled out a V12 with three pedals. McLaren brought back the stick for the first time since the F1. Spyker came back from the dead with a gated shifter and gold trim. Porsche, RUF, Gunther Werks, Hennessey, all of them showing up with a clutch.<\/p>\n
And then there was Lamborghini, parked in the middle of the analog revival with a 1,065-horsepower hybrid V12 and a dual-clutch gearbox.<\/p>\n
No stick. No plans for one either.<\/p>\n
Stephan Winkelmann, chairman and CEO of Lamborghini, was asked directly about it during Monterey Car Week. He did not leave much room.<\/p>\n
“For me, this is something which is not on our priority list, because we have a lot in the pipeline,” he told CarBuzz<\/a>. “[The manual gearbox] is mostly for collectibles, and today we don’t have any plans to do so.”<\/p>\n The reason he sounds so sure comes from experience. Winkelmann has said that back when Lamborghini still offered a manual, so few people ordered one that he would personally check in with the customer to make sure they had not ticked the wrong box on the form.<\/p>\n Think about that. A supercar CEO calling buyers to ask if they meant to buy a stick.<\/p>\n Chief Marketing and Sales Officer Federico Foschini has been slightly warmer on the idea, telling MotorTrend<\/a> that a manual is “an opportunity” but not under evaluation in the short term, and calling manual supercars a niche product. He made much the same point at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in July<\/a>, framing it as an opportunity the company is aware of and is choosing not to take.<\/p>\n Here is where it gets a little awkward.<\/p>\n When Lamborghini walked back the all-electric Lanzador<\/a>, the company’s public reasoning was not about range or charging or cost. It was about feel. Lamborghini buyers want to be connected to the car, and an EV does not deliver that. No noise, no drama, no theater.<\/p>\n Fair enough. Lamborghini V12s sound like a horror movie soundtrack when they come through downtown at 1 a.m., and no battery pack replicates that.<\/p>\n But if connection is the whole argument, the manual gearbox is the most direct version of it available. Three pedals is connection in its cheapest, most literal form. Every other brand on that Quail lawn just spent a fortune saying exactly that.<\/p>\n Lamborghini’s answer is that the connection comes from the engine, not the gearbox. Which is a defensible position. It is just a narrower one than the company was making eighteen months ago.<\/p>\n Not a manual, but not nothing.<\/p>\n The Revuelto SV debuted at The Quail with the most powerful engine in company history: a naturally aspirated 6.5-liter V12 paired with three axial-flux electric motors, good for 1,065 horsepower and 1,051 pound-feet of torque.<\/p>\n It shifts through an eight-speed dual-clutch. Obviously.<\/p>\n Winkelmann was asked whether Lamborghini’s electrified powertrains could even work with a manual and did not have a definitive answer. Full hybrid systems and clutch pedals do not currently coexist well, which is a real engineering constraint rather than a marketing preference.<\/p>\n What makes this year different is not that a manual showed up. It is how many did, and how few of each are being built.<\/p>\n McLaren’s McL 6GT<\/a> is the headline. Codenamed P50, it pairs a V8 with a manual and rear-wheel drive inside a carbon-fiber monocoque. Hydraulic steering, knurled aluminum switchgear, mechanical bits left visible on purpose. The whole car is an argument about feel. It is a concept for now, with production confirmed for 2028. The F1 arrived in 1992 and the last one was built in 1998, which makes this McLaren’s first three-pedal road car in nearly three decades.<\/p>\n Gordon Murray Special Vehicles brought the S1<\/a>, a road-going evolution of last year’s S1 LM. Central driving position, three seats, a bespoke 4.2-liter naturally aspirated Cosworth V12 making 680 horsepower and spinning to a 12,100 rpm redline. The engine bay is left open so you can see the polished Inconel exhaust and the 24-carat gold-plated heat shield. Sixty-four cars.<\/p>\n Spyker’s C8 Preliator XXV<\/a> is the comeback story. The Dutch marque has gone bankrupt twice, in 2014 and 2021, and founder Victor Muller only reacquired the name and IP last October. The new car uses an Audi-sourced 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8 making around 800 horsepower, a six-speed manual running through Spyker’s trademark exposed linkage, and a hand-hammered aluminum body that takes roughly 2,100 hours per car. The example shown at The Quail carries chassis number 270, the last of the 255 Spykers built since the brand’s revival in 2000.<\/p>\n RUF showed the Ehra<\/a>, named for the Ehra-Lessien proving ground where the original CTR Yellowbird made its name. It looks like a widebody 911 and is nothing of the sort underneath: RUF’s own carbon-fiber monocoque, a twin-turbo 3.6-liter flat-six making 650 horsepower, and a seven-speed manual driving all four wheels.<\/p>\n Gunther Werks brought the GXR-Evo, a 993-based track car with a naturally aspirated 4.0-liter flat-six co-developed with Rothsport Racing, 455 horsepower, a redline just under 9,000 rpm, and a re-engineered Getrag G50 six-speed. It weighs 2,386 pounds, and the intake uses slide-valve throttle bodies instead of butterflies. Fifteen will be built<\/a>, from $1.4 million, each delivered with a racing simulator configured to match the owner’s actual car.<\/p>\n Hennessey’s Blackbird is the outlier on timing. A naturally aspirated 6.2-liter V8 revving beyond 9,000 rpm, a six-speed gated manual, a target dry weight under 3,000 pounds and a claimed 2.5-second run to 60 mph. Production does not start until 2029, once the Venom F5 finishes its run.<\/p>\n And Porsche, the only one of these you could theoretically walk into a dealership and order, confirmed a manual for the 2027 911 Carrera S.<\/p>\n The last one was the Gallardo LP560-2, which ran until 2014. The 50th Anniversary edition arrived in early 2013.<\/p>\n The last V12 Lamborghini you could get with a clutch pedal was the Murci\u00e9lago LP670-4 SV, and reportedly only around five were ever ordered that way.<\/p>\n Five.<\/p>\n Which is the entire case Winkelmann is making, and it is hard to argue with the arithmetic. Nobody bought them when they were available. The brands building manuals now are not selling transportation, they are selling scarcity to collectors, in runs of 15 and 25 and 64.<\/p>\n Lamborghini does not do runs of 25. It builds thousands of cars a year and sells them to people who want the noise, the doors and the badge, and who are perfectly happy with paddles.<\/p>\n So the strategy makes sense on a spreadsheet. It just sits oddly next to a company that spent the last year arguing that what its customers really want is to feel connected to the machine, right up until the cheapest way to deliver that showed up on every rival’s stand at the same show.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The lawn at The Quail this year looked like somebody raided a 1995 parts catalog. Gordon Murray rolled out a … <\/p>\nThe connection argument cuts both ways<\/h2>\n
What Lamborghini actually brought to Monterey<\/h2>\n
The manual roll call, with the numbers attached<\/h2>\n
Lamborghini has not built a manual in over a decade<\/h2>\n