Buyers who want the new Gallardo restoration from CAVËN Atelier will pay €900,000, about $1 million, and that price excludes the donor car. Only 25 HOMMAGE 26 cars will ever exist. Each one is built on a first-generation Lamborghini Gallardo supplied by the customer or sourced by the atelier.
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The designer behind the project is the man who drew the original car. Fabrizio Giugiaro, working through his GFG Style studio, first penned the Gallardo at Italdesign in 1998.
What stays from 1998 and what is new
According to Autoblog’s report on the project, the nose is largely carried over from Giugiaro’s original vision, while the rear is new. Only five original parts survive on each car: the roof, the side windows, the windshield, the side mirrors and the mirror bases. Everything else is a carbon-fiber body, with pop-down headlights, active aero flaps and a rear window that opens to reveal the engine. Autoblog paraphrases Giugiaro as describing the car as an evolution of an old idea instead of a copy of it.
The interior is being redesigned too, though details have been withheld. HOMMAGE 26 also launches the atelier’s Designer Series, a program meant to let well-known designers remix their own icons. Giugiaro’s studio, GFG Style, lists a run of low-volume projects on its own site, including the one-off Peralta S for the Mexican collector Carlos Peralta and a tribute Panda Top Less. The GFG Style website does not mention the Gallardo project or CAVËN Atelier, so the details here rest on Autoblog’s account.
A 5.0-liter V10 and a manual gearbox
The original 5.0-liter V10 stays, retuned by Italtecnica for more power. It revs to 8,500 rpm. Output is 540 hp in GT trim or 560 hp in Performance trim, and the transmission is a manual. Those are the engine-room details that matter to the buyers this series targets, since the Gallardo was among the last Lamborghinis available with a stick shift, and few modern supercars still offer one at all.
Chassis changes are modest by restomod standards. A two-mode suspension gives the driver a comfort or sport setting, the brakes are upgraded, and the car rolls on 20-inch wheels. Autoblog does not state a weight figure, a zero-to-60 time or a delivery timeline. The V10 is the part of Lamborghini history that the company itself has been discussing lately. Autoblog ran a piece on how Lamborghini knew that ending its V10 would upset enthusiasts, which gives the retuned engine in a 25-car run a certain symbolic weight for owners who miss the naturally aspirated sound.
The arithmetic of a 25-car run on donor Gallardos
The price math is the most interesting part. The €900,000 figure covers the work, not the starting point, so the real cost of a car depends on what a first-generation Gallardo costs the buyer, and on any extras. Autoblog says the price excludes both the donor car and optional extras, and it gives no estimate of the donor’s cost. Lamborghini itself built more than 12,000 Gallardos by February 2012, after the model debuted at the 2003 Geneva show and ran for about nine years, so donor cars exist, but clean, low-mileage examples are what a project at this level would want. The cap is firm on the other side of the ledger: Autoblog reports that only 25 HOMMAGE 26s will ever exist, so each donor car consumed by the program is permanently converted.
Autoblog has also profiled a Gallardo owner who drives his car every day, a reminder that the used market for these cars is real and active, with owners who use them. A buyer sourcing a donor will be competing with them. The project also says something about where the market for the old V10 supercars has gone. Instead of restoring cars to factory condition, atelier-style programs now rebuild them around a named designer, a numbered edition and a price that resets what a donor car is worth. Giugiaro’s name is the product here as much as the metalwork is, since the pitch is that the person who drew the Gallardo in 1998 has been given a second go at it.
Keeping the manual gearbox and the naturally aspirated V10 is a deliberate choice. Lamborghini no longer builds either in a new car, and Italtecnica’s retune is aimed at squeezing more from an engine that revs to 8,500 rpm without adding turbochargers or electrification. At 540 hp in GT trim and 560 hp in Performance trim, the cars land near the output of the late Gallardo LP560-4, so the pitch is feel and design rather than a performance leap.
Buyers also have a choice of route to the donor. They can bring their own first-generation Gallardo or ask CAVËN Atelier to find one, which means the real total will vary from customer to customer, and the €900,000 headline is better read as a starting cost than a final bill. Whether 25 buyers appear at this price is the unanswered question, since no delivery schedule or order count has been published. CAVËN Atelier says only that 25 HOMMAGE 26s will exist, and Autoblog reports no word on how many are already spoken for.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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