Lamborghini: Forty Years [Hardcover]

David Jolliffe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 19, 2004

For forty years, Lamborghini has been one of the world's most flamboyant and exotic car marques. Written by a long-term Lamborghini insider, the book tells, for the first time, the real story of the men who kept alive the Italian business making cars bought by wealthy business executives, show business celebrities and sports stars.Custodians of Lamborghini have included Chysler and businessmen in Switzerland and Asia. Now Lamborghini sits alongside Bugatti at Audi, part of the Volkswagen Group.Previous Lamborghini books have been little more than collections of pictures of the cars and technical descriptions, but this one describes the character of the men whose passion for Lamborghini kept the company alive. The book is published in 2004 as the all-new Lamborghini Gallardo goes on sale, 41 years after the original 350GTV burst onto the scene at the Turin motor show.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

David Jolliffe dreamt, like many boys, of becoming a world motor racing champion. Instead, after playing a key role with an F1 team, he sold sports cars before distributing Lamborghinis in Britain (which vied with Germany as the No. 2 market after the USA) for 30 years. He remains close friends with many people who were key players in the fortunes of Lamborghini over the decades.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 192 pages
• Publisher: Motorbooks; First edition (September 19, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0760319456
• ISBN-13: 978-0760319451
• Product Dimensions: 10.4 x 10.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #823,376 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #65 in Books > Professional & Technical > Automotive > Luxury

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Lamborghini -- 40 years, April 1, 2005

By 

D. Anderson - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lamborghini: Forty Years (Hardcover)

Nicely published, great cover, very good quality paper, excellent photos. Contains much material not generally available prior to this work. The focus is on financial issues, various owners of the company, top managers and engineers involved, and other aspects of the company (not so much the cars). Interesting coverage of the marine engines built for offshore racing and some material on the various F1 efforts. The coverage of the early years of the factory is more sketchy. I found a large number of glaring and important errors throught the book and this was disappointing. Surely a quick pre-publication review by a person even moderately knowledgable in the subject could have caught many of the larger mistakes.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Nice book ... but, January 9, 2005

By 

Johan Kerstens "www.Disegno-S.com" (Belgium) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lamborghini: Forty Years (Hardcover)

I've been collecting Lamborghini automobilia and books for over twenty years now, and I have every English written book published on Lamborghini.

When this one was announced I pre-ordered it and when it finally arrived I had the same sentiment as some of the other reviewers here, it's a nice book, but there are a lot of errors, and wrong captions with photo's.
Other than that it's a nice book, perhaps some of the models were overlooked or didn't get as much attention as we would like, especially the new models like the Gallardo, Murcielago Barchetta and the Murcielago R-GT, all press photo's, but I guess at the time of writing there weren't too many cars available to photograph.

All in all a nice book, good addition to any collection or Lamborghini enthusiast, but not a source book or encyclopedia on Lamborghini, just a nice selection of photo's and easy to read story.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars great story, but..., November 22, 2004

By 

T. A. De Feyter - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Lamborghini: Forty Years (Hardcover)

The story is great, well researched, and offered many new insights. But the big flaw are the pictures. As another reviewer wrote, there as just too many mistakes. Mixing the Diablo for a Countach is simply ...! Didn't the author see the final print? The book has a strange lay-out. Thanks to the format half of the page has text, the other half is plain-blank. Enough blank space for many more pictures. That's the book's other picture-problem: There aren't many. No pictures, except one, of prototypes. There is also far too much attention for the Audi-age, with a whole chapter about the Gallardo. This section has loads of Gallardo-pictures, but all of them are factory-photo's I already saw in various car-magazines. Almost no attention for the lm002 either. You do need to buy another Lamborghini photo-book to get the picture.