It's got nothing to do with Vorsprung durch Technik

A suit from Audi might not be the obvious choice for Lamborghini technical boss, but there's more to Rouven Mohr than meets the eye, finds Mike Duff

- Mike Duff

Lamborghini's cars are never short on character, and the same can usually be said of the company's senior executives. Few were more charismatic (or knowledgeable) than Maurizio Reggiani, Lambo's long-serving chief technical officer, whose previous career highlights included doing much of the development work on the Bugatti EB110 and its quad-turbocharged V12 engine. So when it was announced earlier this year that Reggiani was leaving his role to head up Lamborghini's motorsport division and was set to be replaced by an Audi engineer called Rouven Mohr, it looked like the start of a new (and possibly duller) corporate era.

Yet we shouldn't be worrying. Because while much of Mohr's personality is as you might expect from a German automotive engineer (including a ferocious intelligence, borne out by the title of his doctoral thesis, Consistent Time Integration of Finite Elast-Plasto-Dynamics), he's also a car enthusiast, one whose interests are much broader and more esoteric than you might expect.

Having started out working in chassis testing for Audi in 2008, Mohr progressed rapidly, moving to Lamborghini for the first time in 2017 as head of whole vehicle development before returning to Audi for another stint. He acknowledges that Reggiani was a huge influence.

"Legend is the right word," says Mohr. "For me, it's even more. I would say he was a mentor to me, always supporting even when I wasn't at Lamborghini. The shoes I'm filling are incredibly big."

Mohr is now 43, although he looks younger, and his automotive passions are definitely those of a child of the 1990s. He won't give an exact number for his own car collection "let's just say it's somewhere between 10 and 20" - but admits that the tally includes a full set of Nissan GT-Rs from the R32 to the R35, a Lotus Exige, a Peugeot 205 Rallye, a Renault Clio Williams and a U406 Mercedes-Benz Unimog with bigger wheels and a custom paint scheme.