Driving Lamborghinis across ice teaches ultimate car control
ST-ALEXIS-DES-MONTS, QUEBEC The majority of people reading this are unlikely to own, or to even potentially own, a Lamborghini.
The scant few ultra-high-networth individuals who do own one of these Italian exotics are even less likely to install winter tires and put it through the onerous task of driving on snowy, salty roads during the supercar offseason.
Fewer still aspire to take these handcrafted automobiles, with names like Huracán, Aventador, and Performante, out on a frozen lake and spend a day carving arcs in ice while drifting on a specially prepared closed course.
But for the handful of Lamborghini cognoscenti who do, there’s Lamborghini Winter Accademia, a three-tier driver training program, going from the basic Esperienza program that gives inexperienced supercar drivers a taste of their vehicles’ racetrack potential to the advanced Pilota program that readies more experienced drivers for competition, like the Super Trofeo spec racing class.
We’re taking part in the midlevel Accademia program, which is itself divided into winter and summer events. It’s the first time the winter program has been held in Canada since Accademia was introduced in 2013.
A $12,000 entry fee gets you admission to the three-day event, which includes transportation to and from the airport, accommodation at Hotel Sacacomie, about two hours northeast of Montreal, all meals, extracurricular activities such as dog sledding and, of course, access to more than a dozen 2018 Lamborghinis on ice, all of which feature all-wheel drive.
Several exercises are laid out on the frozen Sacacomie Lake, including a fast and slow slalom, a twisty road course, an icy skid pad, and the “peanut,” a figureeight course where you can hone your Scandinavian-flick skills. An instructor always accompanies you in the car, and the hired guns at the Winter Accademia are all current or former professional race drivers.
My first exercise is the circular skid pad, in an Huracán LP610-4. This is the only course on which traction and stability controls are turned off, since there are no turning transitions in which the likelihood of spinning out increases without the electronics. This also allows you to find the ideal balance of throttle to make controlled skids, with very little steering input and a very steady right foot.
The trick is to override your reflex of letting off the gas if the rear end swings out too far, and press down even harder on the pedal, allowing the car’s AWD system to transfer power to the front wheels, which immediately pulls the front end back in line and in the intended direction. Not doing so almost always ends up in a tailspin. Learning this driving technique alone should help prevent snowbound disasters on the road.
An Aventador S LP740-4 is used on the slalom course, and to make things interesting, it is equipped with studded winter tires in the front, and lightly studded summers in the rear. This makes the car very loose and tail-happy, a trait that is exacerbated by the car’s rear-wheel steering. This setup is designed to allow drivers to learn to control a rear-end skid using the car’s AWD system at safe speeds.
Where you’d normally let off the throttle if the rear end of a reardriver swings out, you’re taught to get on the gas in these cars, and finding the right balance to make uninterrupted laps of the circuit turns out to be the most fun I’ve had at speeds below 50 km/ h.
My favourite and most difficult exercise is on the peanut, in another Huracán. Here the skills picked up in the other exercises culminate in one non-stop flickand-slide. Again, it’s a game of balance. Get it right and the car becomes your partner in an elegant figure-eight ballet. Get it wrong and you’ll be taking an ungraceful trip into the snow bank. And several drivers did make nosedives into the snow, but organizers just pulled the cars out of their snowy traps, brushed them off, and the show went on.
If you think the price of entry is high, it’s not. This program isn’t for average folk; it’s for the few who can afford to have a Lamborghini parked in the driveway. For those people, the entry price is tantamount to the cost of installing a new set of tires. And by attending the Lamborghini Winter Accademia, they can exploit the supercar’s performance in winter conditions, leave with some newfound skills, and leave their prized possessions to rest quietly under the cover of a dry, heated garage.