One of the best-sounding cars to make the run up the hill at the 2025 Goodwood Festival of Speed was a Lamborghini Sesto Elemento. The ultra-rare trackday supercar’s barely-muffled V10 screamed its way to the finish. Its Italian howl is one of the reasons we wish the hillclimb did just a bit more climbing.
This particular Sesto Elemento is different from the others Lamborghini built so many years ago. All of those, whether 10 or 20 or however many were actually made, were track-only hypercars meant to be used on public roads. But this one is road-legal – it’s been modified by the wizards at Lanzante and is currently the only one in the world. We had a chance to talk to Lanzante officials about it recently at the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Ultra-Light Track Car Finds A New Home On The Road
The 2011 Lamborghini Sesto Elemento was one of the most impressive vehicles to come out of that year. The name is a reference to carbon, the sixth element in the periodic table, because the car is made almost entirely from carbon fiber. It’s how Lamborghini managed to make this V10 AWD beast weigh just 2,202 pounds, or less than a Mazda MX-5.
Its track-only specification was one of the reasons this hypercar was so light. When you don’t need all the dozens of regulatory pains in the posterior, and you’re not planning on doing official crash testing, you can trim out plenty of weight. Helping its cause even more, low production and a $2 million price tag meant Lamborghini could use different composites, including forged carbon.
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There have been at least two occasions when Lamborghini built a 2,200-pound supercar, and the Sesto Elemento is one of them.
Did that make it impossible for Lanzante to make one road legal? Evidently not, because the company told us plans are in the works for a second road-legal Sesto Elemento. The British-based company has – forgive the pun – a good track record for converting some surprising track-only cars to road legal status. That includes the Red Bull RB17 and the just-revealed Pagani Huayra R.
Trackday Lambo Needed Surprisingly Little Work
Lanzante reps told CarBuzz the Sesto Elemento needed less work than some cars because of its age and its underpinnings. Being 15 years old, it only needs to meet standards from that era. Lanzante had to make sure it could pass emissions and that it had the right lighting, and other changes needed to make the car livable on the street.
The company didn’t have to go to extremes like creating new buttons with different radii so that they would pass certification. Or add headlights, since this car already had them. Lanzante did have to add features like air conditioning. Let’s face it, that’s something you’d like to have on the track, but it’s not vital for turning laps. On the street, however, looking cool is way better when you are actually cool.
Lanzante also added a nose lift system so that the car could manage speed bumps and steep driveways. This, along with air con, are the kind of practical changes supercar companies started making to their road cars right around this time.
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When it comes to finding parts to convert a car like this, it can be a serious challenge. If everything in the car was bespoke, you wouldn’t zip down to your dealer for some new items. But the Sesto Elemento is largely Gallardo-based, including that 562-horsepower V10 engine. So Lanzante told us it wasn’t so bad to convert the car simply because so many parts were from the Gallardo already.
Yes, this all adds to the weight, about 440 pounds we’re told. Still, at under 2,700 pounds, this is about as light of a 500-horsepower car as you’ll find anywhere. That means it still maintains its original focus, if not its purpose.
Source: Lanzante
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