In a small corner of Lamborghini’s concept car department, we imagine there is the word ‘restraint’ plastered across the wall… with a giant black mark painted right over it.

Because few car companies do motor show excess like the boys and girls from Sant Agata. Witness the Veneno, the Urus and the poke-your-eye-out-sharp Sesto Elemento. But wind the clock back literally months before the firm’s ascent from the darkness and uncertainty of multiple ownership back in 1998, and Lamborghini knocked out something special for that year’s Paris Motor Show. Internet, reacquaint yourself with the Pregunta.

It’s being offered up for sale by exotic classic car hawkers Autodrome, a French company who tell us this prototype was signed off barely a few months before the Volkswagen behemoth scooped Lamborghini into its Death Star conglomerate.

Built in conjunction with the Italian branch of the French Carrosserie Heuliez, it sits on a modified Lamborghini Diablo platform, running rear-wheel-drive (instead of the Diablo’s four-wheel-drive system) and a 530bhp V12 engine; good for a standing kilometre in under 20 seconds, and a top speed of 207mph. That’s a big hammer.

Of course, it’s all about the show with this car, and as such, it comes with a typically concept-car body, replete with two ‘half-roofs’ made from transparent polycarbonate to allow the noise of that V12 to bludgeon your ears into submission. Oh, and the paintjob? The same paint used on the Dassault Rafale jet fighter.

There’s also a “combat jet-derived” cockpit, fully electronic F1-style Marelli instruments, internal fibre optic lightning, a rear-view camera that replaces the mirrors, and even a GPS system.

Looks very Zonda-ish, don’t you think? Yours for the bargain sum of £1.3m, should you wish to purchase a bit of pre-VW Lamborghini madness…

Vijay Pattni

Pictures courtesy of Autodrome.fr. For more info click here