lamborghini's increasing wealth allowed him to purchase faster more expensive cars than the tiny fiats he had tinkered with during his youth. he owned cars such as alfa romeos and lancias during the early 1950s and at one point he had enough cars to use a different one every day of the week, adding a mercedes-benz 300sl, a jaguar e-type coupé, and two maserati 3500 gts. of the latter, lamborghini said, "adolfo orsi, then the owner of maserati, was a man i had a lot of respect for: he had started life as a poor boy, like myself. but i did not like his cars much. they felt heavy and did not really go very fast."