Murcielago successor "two generations ahead"

Italian supercar maker Lamborghini has guaranteed next year's Murcielago replacement will maintain the high-horsepower rage by confirming it will have an all-new V12 engine and an innovative new gearbox.

In a big-spending move that Lamborghini boss, Stephan Winkelmann, claims will jump its super-sports car "two generations ahead in every sense", the new engine will blast the supercar -- often incorrectly called the Jota but codenamed LP837 -- to 100km/h in less than three seconds.

Despite a 20 per cent reduction in fuel consumption and emissions, the LP837 will boast 525kW (700hp) of power and 690Nm of torque from an engine that does not share a single component with the outgoing Murcielago's 640 horsepower motor.

But the engine is not the only fast or powerful part of the LP837. Its all-new computer architecture boasts more than half a billion calculations per second, while its breakthrough new gearbox will shift gears in just 50 milliseconds -- and it's not a DSG.

The new dry-sump engine, codenamed L539 and to be hand-built in Sant'Agata rather than on Audi's production lines to maintain its V12 tradition, will be enough to see the carbon-chassised supercar reach a top speed "in excess" of 350km/h.

It uses a larger bore and a shorter stroke (now 95mm x 76.4mm) to reduce friction. The bore centres are further apart and it's been given a stratospheric 11.8:1 compression ratio, though its 6498.5cc overall capacity isn't much different to the existing V12's 6495.7. Even though its rev limit has moved up from 8000 to 8250rpm, the 21 metres-per-second maximum piston speed is lower than the Murcielago's.

There has been a lot of fresh design work on the bottom end of the engine, so that the sump sits 60mm lower in the chassis than the Murcielago's V12 and the overall weight is down by 18kg to 235kg.

At 784mm long, the V12 is also 665mm high and 848mm wide, even with its three-into-one exhaust manifolds in place. Reductions in weight have been made wherever possible: the forged, nitride-hardened crankshaft weighs just 24.6kg; each of the aluminium-silicon alloy, four-valve cylinder heads weighs 21kg and the crankcase has also been made out of an aluminium-silicon alloy.

It retains the Murcielago's layout of four throttle bodies, and scores a variable intake and exhaust system, in-cylinder ionization control to eliminate knocking (even with its high-compression ratio) and the bed plate has eight scavenge pumps integrated into it.

Yet, its emissions figures are not all they seem because while Winkelmann refused to confirm it, the LP837 will use a lightweight carbon-fibre chassis, and is expected to weigh at least 150kg less than the Murcielago LP-640.

A major slice of the 20 per cent emission improvement will be down to the reduced weight, rather than the engine's development. In reality, the engine itself will boast an emissions improvement of closer to 5 per cent than 20, and that's largely due to Lamborghini sticking with multi-point fuel injection, rather than the more-accurate direct-injection system it already uses on its V10 Gallardo.

"When we decided to do it, we thought of the future EU6 rules and what the customer wanted," Winkelmann defended.

"We wanted low back pressure and using multi-point injection was a simple solution that could avoid adding additional weight to keep the engine as small as possible and still reach the targets."

Insiders, though, suggested the company avoided direct-injection systems to guarantee the V12's development would be kept in-house at Sant'Agata rather than bringing in outside suppliers and Audi's own fuel-injection experts, which also helped to keep in-house control of the car's new-generation electrical architecture.

Sources have also insisted that direct-injection will eventually find its way onto the LP837 in 2015 -- the deadline Lamborghini has set itself to reduce its fleet emissions by 35 per cent.

Yet, if the new engine will be as controversial for what it doesn't have as for what it does have, the LP837's gearbox will be a thing of universal wonder.

With Winkelmann slamming double-clutch gearboxes as lacking the emotion needed for supercars, Lamborghini has worked with Italian transmission specialist, Graziano, to provide the best example yet of a paddle-shift manual gearbox.

The result is a seven-speed unit that changes gear in just 50 milliseconds and weighs less the double-clutch gearbox in a VW Golf GTi. Lamborghini has managed this by turning the idea of sequential shifting on its head and dubbed the result the ISR, or Independent Shifting Rods.

Recognising that disengaging and engaging the synchromesh was the major waste of time during each shift, it broke up the traditional 1-2, 3-4, 5-6 gear pairings so that it can be engaging the next gear's synchro at the same time as it disengages the one that's already hooked up.

With all of its oil and hydraulic lines cast into the aluminium casing (it runs an astonishing 60 bar of oil pressure), it's not only stiffer and more reliable than conventional ‘boxes, but the two-shaft unit weighs just 70kg, or 79kg with its twin-plate clutch attached. And all that with a 750Nm input torque ceiling.

"In the presentation of this gearbox, there is low weight and no packaging constraints," Winkelmann claimed.

"Compared to DSG, the more emotional gearbox is the one we have developed in-house. DSG gearboxes are not emotional, but ours has an emotional interpreting of the closing of the clutch and this is really an original piece of thinking from Lamborghini."

That it is. It's an astonishing design, with no external tubes or brackets and with the extreme lightweight, inertia-reducing internals feature list including the debut of triple-cone, carbon-fibre synchromesh rings on every gear including reverse.

"No other auto-manual gearbox can move two synchros at once," Lamborghini technical director, Maurizio Reggiani claimed.

"It also means we can have smooth, low-speed shifting on light throttle openings and hard, aggressive shifting on fast shifts. It changes gear about 40 per cent faster than the Gallardo Superleggera's E.Gear, and that's already incredibly fast.

"It also moves the centre-of-gravity of the driveline closer to the centre-of-gravity of the car and it gives more space in the tunnel area for the driver and the passenger.

"We don't have a lot of patents on it, because the concept has been used in motorsport before. We really paid close attention to the work done by Peter Hollinger in Australia for this and that set us off on this path."

The LP837's obsession with reducing weight and adding stiffness continues in the driveline, with the rear differential cast into the engine block and the adoption of a Haldex IV all-wheel-drive system in place of the current viscous-coupling system.

"Normally, it is 30:70 front-to-rear, but it can shift instantly to give 60 per cent torque to the front. It can be zero at the front, but the size of the front diff limits it to 60 per cent of the maximum torque."

To launch the LP837 to 100km/h in under 3 seconds, Lamborghini developed a new launch-control system and aimed to link all the car's computer systems in one loop.

"It's a completely new electrical system," Reggiani confirmed. "We don't have one for the engine, one for the box, one for the AWD. There's just one system and it's based on a master ECU and a slave ECU.

"There's more than half a billion operations per second -- that's how much information per second goes to the ECU -- and the engine ECU is normally the master, except in launches when the gearbox ECU is the master."

Engine - L537 (LP640)
Weight - 253kg
Compression ratio -11.1
Capacity - 6495.7cc
Power - 640hp @ 8000rpm 
Torque - 660Nm @ 6000rpm
Bore spacing- 95mm

Engine - L539 (LP837)
Weight - 235kg
Compression ratio - 11.8:1
Capacity - 6498.5cc
Power - 700hp @ 8250rpm
Torque - 690Nm @ 6000rpm
Bore spacing - 103.5mm

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