The Lamborghini Countach is famous for a few things, but one of them is the massive wing sprouting from the rear deck. Although not in the design brief for the original LP400 (or its LPI 800-4 homage from 2022), the spoiler was a common request after a 1975 one-off commissioned by F1 team owner Walter Wolf, and it quickly became one of the Countach’s signature design features. In an era when contemporary Ferraris and Porsches had body-contouring spoilers and rear lips, the Lambo’s picnic table wing was garish, bold, and innovative. The same descriptors might also belong to Lamborghini’s latest patent, a movable roof spoiler that directs air to a similarly flexible rear wing.
More Spoilers For More Fun
Perhaps taking a page from the Cannonball Run Countach’s silly front-end spoilers, the recently patented aero system comprises an actuated roof spoiler, which can either deflect air or allow it to flow undisturbed over the car. The patent illustration, which depicts a Revuelto, shows the spoiler mounted to the trailing edge of the car’s roof, within the flat niche carved out by the Lambo’s buttress-style C-pillar. Placing a roof spoiler on that spot could take advantage of the low-pressure zone formed by the vertical rear window to create some downforce, which would press down on the car from the middle, rather than the rear or the front.
Whether the roof spoiler is actuated or not, the patent text says that airflow over the car will always be directed toward the rear spoiler. On the Revuelto, the rear spoiler has a few different operating modes, with an automatic active aero system that deploys the wing for added downforce or retracts it for reduced drag. The roof wing described in the patent would theoretically increase downforce on the Revuelto, both over its own surface and by directing air to the rear spoiler.
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Lamborghini’s Spoiler Design Could Be Applied Elsewhere
We can’t think of a production vehicle that has such a spoiler as the one described in the Lamborghini patent, although some cars get close. The rear wing of the Ford Mustang GTD, for example, mounts to the car’s frame just above the rear wheels, which results in more even downforce distribution than one mounted to the tail of the car. The Koenigsegg Agera One:1 and Jesko also use a similar rear spoiler, with a high wing component that catches as much air as possible before pushing down on cantilevers mounted just behind the passenger cabin.
In those cases, however, the spoiler layout demands some design and packaging compromises, while Lamborghini could include its new patent in any number of passenger vehicles. The deployable roof spoiler makes great sense for a mid-engined supercar like the Revuelto or Temerario, but it could even show up on a future high-performance variant of the Urus – the actuator would probably eat into some rear-seat headroom, but it might be a worthy compromise for a thrill-seeking SUV owner who rarely brings along their friends for the ride.
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Source: European Patent Office
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