A Former Lamborghini Engineer Just Built the Diablo Roadster the Factory Never Made
A Diablo Rebuilt From the Ground Up, Then Left Open
At The Quail on August 14, restomod house Eccentrica pulled the wraps off the V12 Roadster, an open-top reimagining of the first-series Lamborghini Diablo that Sant'Agata never built. Where the factory Diablo VT Roadster arrived years after the coupe and never fully solved the packaging problem of losing a fixed roof, Eccentrica's car starts from a donor Diablo and is torn down to bare metal, rebuilt around a chassis reinforced for open-top rigidity, and finished with more than 3,500 custom-made parts in steel and carbon fibre. Only 19 will be built.
Under the rear glass -- or rather, under nothing at all now -- sits a re-engineered 5.7-litre naturally aspirated V12 producing 550 hp at 7,000 rpm and 443 lb-ft at 6,500 rpm, paired with a gated six-speed manual. Eccentrica quotes a 208 mph top speed and a 3,395 lb kerb weight, numbers that put it closer to a modern GT than a 1990s supercar despite the analogue drivetrain.
The Engineer Behind It
What separates the V12 Roadster from the usual restomod is who built it: Maurizio Reggiani, Lamborghini's former chief technical officer, led the project. Reggiani's résumé includes the Murciélago, Huracán and Aventador -- meaning the man responsible for three generations of factory V12 and V10 Lamborghinis has now applied that experience to reworking the car all of them descended from, this time with no factory constraints on weight, packaging or production cost.
Why Dubai's Diablo Collectors Will Be Watching
Dubai and the wider GCC have long been one of the deepest markets for first-generation Diablos, prized for the naturally aspirated V12 and gated shifter that Lamborghini abandoned once the Murciélago went to a single-clutch automated manual. A roofless, lightened, mechanically sorted version of that same car -- built by the engineer who defined Lamborghini's V12 era for the two decades that followed -- is exactly the kind of low-volume, story-driven restomod that tends to hold its value in the region's collector market long after the donor cars it started from have been forgotten.