Lamborghini Essenza SCV12: celebrating the V12 engine

It’s happening folks. Lamborghini is preparing its departure from its very successful V12 engine, and its doing it in style. They’ve announced the arrival of its new glorious track-toy, the Essenza SCV12, and it’s to die for.

Onward from the mighty V12 engine

We here at Mikaniki revere the V12 engine. It’s quite remarkable what this large infrastructure of engineering supremacy has achieved. We’ve paid our own tribute to it, and have counted down our top five V12-powered cars. But what Lamborghini have done with the Essenza SCV12 has made us sit up and take notice.

In many ways, this is the same engine you’d find beneath the hood of the Aventador S. A 6.5L unit with the capacity to deliver mounds of power. But there are a few very significant tweaks that have taken this to a new level, starting with repositioning.

The team at SC has taken the engine, and given it a 180. Yep, it’s now facing the other way. This meaning that the output, which drives a central differential in the all-wheel-drive Aventador, now comes out of the back.

Facing the other way also means its allowed the engineers to put the six-speed, structural gearbox in the back, driving only the rear wheels, with the rear pushrod suspension mounted directly onto it. In layman’s terms, this translates to: wow.

Power with the aerodynamics

Okay, let’s recap. 6.5L flipped SCV12 engine mated to a six-speed sequential gearbox. Must be pretty powerful, won’t you say? Well, if you thought the Aventador SVJ’s 759 bhp was a lot, think again. The Essenza SCV12 delivers a magnanimous 830 ponies, thanks to a ram-air effect at high speeds, galloping away to the title of most powerful naturally aspirated V12 engine in Lamborghini’s arsenal.

But the Essenza SCV12 is more than sheer power, producing more downforce than a GT3 car, courtesy of a front splitter and huge adjustable carbon-fiber rear wing.

Don’t know much about aerodynamics myself, but I do recall the McLaren F1 not needing such massive rear wings to keep the car grounded at breakneck speed. And this was in the 90s…#shade

The Essenza SCV12 has also shaved almost 136 kgs off the Aventador SVJ, thanks to the extreme use of composite materials and an FIA-compliant crash structure that doesn’t use a metal cage. 830 bhp and 1377 kgs: we’ll take those numbers.

Customer is boss

Given these impressive specs, does it mean we’ll be seeing it running laps in a GT racing series? Not quite. Lamborghini’s CTO, Maurizio Reggiani, doesn’t want to set the lap time at Nurburgring. He’s got other, should we say, “customer-centric” plans for the Essenza SCV12.

40 rich sods will have the chance to get behind the wheel, attending advanced driving programs at a racetrack of their choice. They’ll be assigned a team of Squadra Corse engineers and mentoring from five-time Le Mans champ Emanuele Pirro.

But what happens after those rich sods have had their fun on the track? Simple, their Essenza SCV12 will be taken to a super safe warehouse (location unknown for obvious reasons), and whenever they feel like a Sunday outing on the track, all they need to do is fly in, mess around, and then fly back home again.

All’s we can say is, if you can be one of the lucky 40, don’t miss out. It’ll be worth your while.