This Lamborghini Huracán’s Sole Purpose Is to Guide Planes Around an Italian Airport

Picture this: you’ve got the next two weeks off, a hankering for prosciutto, and a flight scheduled to land in Italy on a Saturday morning. Not a bad premise for a vacation. Now, imagine that on landing, your plane files in behind a 580-horsepower Lamborghini, one which does nothing but shepherd planes around the airport all day, every day.

It probably sounds like a scenario you played out on the living room carpet as a child, but it’s no fantasy; an airport in Bologna, Italy has its own Lamborghini Huracan that performs these exact duties day in, day out.

Bologna Guglielmo Marconi International Airport, known as BLQ to airline pilots, has just updated the design on its Lamborghini Huracán LP 580-2 “follow me” car. Seen in various combinations of yellow, orange, silver, and black over the last few years, the car’s new color scheme is meant to catch the attention of pilots, who are instructed to follow the supercar to their plane’s scheduled gate.

The absolutely grueling responsibilities of driving an Italian supercar around an airfield all day may sound like a job belonging to a TV host, but it’s actually an important task, one delegated to a well-trained aircraft ground control marshal. If air traffic control is the coordinating brain of an airport, then ground control is the hand, pointing planes where they need to go.

As such, the job isn’t supposed to mean hooning the car around all day, but with how loose Italy’s transportation schedules get, there’s probably time for the occasional donut or drift. With the entry-level LP 580-2 being rear-wheel-drive, rather than all-wheel-drive like most Huracans are, it’s easy to get the back end loose, though you can’t help but wonder if it gets a little hairy in sub-optimal weather, where AWD cars like the Huracan tend to shine.

And shine is what the sun tends to do in Bologna, which averages just 26.4 inches of precipitation per year. Clear weather makes near-accidents while hooning a Huracan rather hard to excuse.