The Lambo V12 Vision Gran Turismo is a racing car too wild for reality

LAMBORGHINI has made many outrageously-styled performance cars over the years but now it’s built one too wild and wacky to exist in reality.

The Lambo V12 Vision Gran Turismo is a “highly visionary” concept car, according to the supercar maker, that’s intended to evolve the company’s design language in a “very futuristic way”.

The Lambo V12 Vision Gran Turismo has also, as its name suggests, been created specifically to appear in the GT Sport racing game on the Sony PlayStation 4 games console.

Lamborghini’s interpretation of the project brief is almost as creative as the car itself. Gran Turismo game series creator Kazunori Yamauchi asked the supercar maker to design a two-seater grand touring performance car, but Lamborgini came back with a single-seat, mid-engined machine conceived specifically for a racing game, “where a passenger is not needed”.

Despite clearly being a car Lamborghini has no plans of putting into production, quite a lot of the technology underpinning it can be traced back to the company’s current road-going models. The V12 that gave the car a portion of its name is supposedly the same 6.5-litre, 774bhp engine from the Lamborghini Sián hypercar, though with an extra 34bhp courtesy of a supercapacitor-based hybrid system.

The Vision Gran Turismo’s distinctive, Y-shaped LED running lights also bear more than a passing resemblance to the items on the Sián, while the controls on the Lambo V12 Vision Gran Turismo’s steering wheel ape the configurable driving modes found on cars such as the Lamborghini Aventador.

However, other gadgets are unlikely to feature on a production Lamborghini any time soon. Instead of opening a “scissor door” — a feature synonymous with Lamborghini supercars — the driver gets in and out of the Lambo V12’s cabin by opening up the fighter jet-style glass canopy. In addition, all the information you’d expect to find on a traditional dashboard binnacle are instead displayed on a central screen on the steering wheel, or a head-up display projected onto the windscreen.

While Lamborghini won’t follow in the footsteps of its sister company Audi and make a fully functioning example of its Vision Gran Turismo concept car, GT Sport players will soon get the chance to take the Lambo V12 Vision Gran Turismo for a spin virtually.

Lamborghini has confirmed the single-seater will be added to the racing game at some point in Spring 2020 — meaning players should be able to squeeze in a bit of digital seat time before the FIA-sanctioned 2020 Gran Turismo Online Championships commence.

Once it does arrive in the game, the Lambo V12 will likely face considerable competition from GT Sport’s other racing concept cars. To date, 26 car manufacturers have designed their own Vision Gran Turismo machines, including the aforementioned Audi e-tron Vision Gran Turismo and 2015’s Le Mans-inspired Bugatti Vision Gran Turismo, which previewed the look of the road-legal Bugatti Chiron hypercar.

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