LAMBORGHINI HURACAN PERFORMANTE
Track-focused Huracán pins hopes of Ferrari Speciale-style greatness on less weight, more power and clever active aero
Being provocative has been at the core of Lamborghini from the start, inspiring the brand’s very foundation, if you believe the legend of company founder Ferruccio responding to a snub from his snooty neighbours in Maranello. Being provocative for modern-day Lamborghini takes a new twist with the Huracán Performante. Until now, Lamborghini has been happy to let Ferrari and Mclaren trade on motorsport-inspired rigour as core brand messages. Boring! If the latest Lamborghini looked outrageous, made enough noise and turned more heads, it was job done.
The Huracán Performante changes that. The Aventador SV’S sub-7min lap of the Nürburgring with in-house hand Marco Mapelli announced that Lamborghini was now hunting for lap times. That a car costing a third as much and with nothing more than a massive V12 and a plucky Italian at the wheel came to within a couple of seconds of the best Porsche could achieve with a million-pound hybrid hypercar and a crack team of factory racing drivers was truly heroic stuff. Indeed, the Nürburgring hadn’t seen anything like it since Tazio Nuvolari humiliated the might of Mercedes and Auto Union in a supposedly obsolete Alfa Romeo back in 1935.
Then Mapelli returned to the ’Ring in the Performante. And, with an eerily calm-looking drive, recorded a 6min 52sec lap to go faster than the Porsche 918 Spyder. Provocative? Senior Porsche execs were overheard getting very sweary about the upstart Italians at the Geneva motor show unveiling for the Performante. Watching Lamborghini boss Stefano Domenicali and R&D chief Maurizio Reggiani beaming like naughty schoolboys only added to the very Lamborghini sense of mischief.
Enough of the soap opera, though. There’s a car to be driven and a track on which to explore its talents. Not the Nürburgring, but an equally scary and notorious venue in the shape of Imola, just down the road from Lamborghini’s Bologna home.
Now, we like the regular Huracán. It’s dramatic, it’s noisy, it’s fast and it’s got the confidence-inspiring underpinnings of the R8 to reassure you that it’s not going to go too hysterical and Italian on you. But thus far, it has been just a little too… safe. The Performante promises to address that. As an opener, the frontend styling is – honestly – inspired by a snake’s fangs and takes on visual cues from the recent Aventador S. For all the clear, lacquered carbonfibre, the bronze wheels, the highmounted exhausts and the flashes of Italian tricolore along the sills, the Performante is – by Lamborghini standards – a relatively restrained effort, if unmistakably more seriouslooking than the regular Huracán.
Forged composite is a visual and technical signature for Lamborghini, the ‘chopped’ carbonfibre set in what it describes as a matrix of resins capable of being moulded into complex and lightweight load-bearing parts, such as that giant rear wing. It’s also used on the front splitter, the engine cover and the diffuser, looking cool and contributing to an overall weight saving of 40kg. That’s welcome but pretty modest, given that Ferrari chopped more than twice that out of the 458 Italia to make the iconic Speciale that this Performante so clearly aims to mimic.
To help matters, that 5.2-litre naturally aspirated V10 has been tickled from the stock 602bhp to
From the driver’s seat (or anywhere within a couple of miles) that engine stands out
631bhp at a glorious 8000rpm. Torque climbs from 413lb ft to 442lb ft, 70% of which is available from just 1000rpm. Again, these are modest gains on paper, but tech you can’t see (titanium valves included) and bits you can (such as bronze-coloured intake manifolds and superbike-inspired exhausts) all add to the magic. It’s quicker, too. Three-tenths off the 0-62mph time – now 2.9sec – is one thing. But a whole second off the 0-124mph sprint, with 8.9sec? That’s serious. Fundamentally, though, it’s the same as the regular LP610-4, in that it drives all four wheels through a seven-speed dual-clutch gearbox and can do all sorts of clever stuff with its front-to-rear torque distribution, actively adjustable magnetorheological dampers and variable steering ratio.
That last one is controversial. The Audi-inherited Lamborghini Dynamic Steering (LDS) is a wellintentioned option on the regular Huracán and can vary the ratio between a fast-geared 9:1 and more lethargic 17:1, depending on which of the three driving modes you’re in and what the black boxes reckon you want. For context, Ferraris tend to be fixed around 12:1 and Mclarens 13:1, give or take. The problem with LDS is its inconsistency. You can arrive at the same corner at a slightly different speed and need a totally different amount of lock to get round it. It isn’t necessarily understeering, but it feels like it is. And that’s not a pleasant or confidence-inspiring sensation. The system was updated and improved for the Aventador SV and S and further modified for the Performante.
But the truly transformational additions are the Pirelli Trofeo tyres (an option over the stock P Zero Corsas) and the active aero that squishes them into the tarmac and allows brave souls like Mapelli to go after those hypercar-bothering lap times. See the separate story on p30 for an explanation of how it works but, suffice to say, it’s really, really clever. Can such things be appreciated by mere mortals, though?
Let’s see. But first, a look at the various modes on offer. Controlled by the Anima switch on the steering wheel, it starts in Strada mode, which is pretty much as per the standard Huracán. Spring rates are raised a relatively modest 10% and roll stiffness by 15% but control arm bushes are significantly beefed up to take the extra loads. But in Strada, the Performante is – all things relative – plush and comfy on the road. Or flaccid and soggy on the track, the LDS flopping this way and that, the dual-clutch gearchanges slurred and the damping best described as loose.
But we’re at Imola. So to Sport. Despite being the midway setting
A twitch of your toe unleashes a mayhem of valve-train thrash and epic exhaust noise
this is the most rear-biased of the modes and therefore the one for sideways heroes. Well, it would be were it not based on Audi-engineered all-wheel-drive underpinnings. If showboating is your goal, stick with that 458 Speciale because the Performante’s drivetrain will always look to pull the car straight.
Corsa mode is where the Performante’s real character is unleashed. The dashboard changes to a race car-style digital display, the engine takes on a harder edge and the gearchanges get more assertive. The whole car feels tensed and ready for action, the variable steering ratio locked into a narrower and faster range, the damping sharpened and the aero vectoring element of the ALA system activated. This is the Performante’s opportunity to show how it differs from the standard Huracán and where that incredible Nürburgring lap time came from.
As such, it seems strange that key elements of the tech – the magnetorheological dampers and dynamic steering – are cost options, respectively adding £4290 (when bundled with the nose lift) and £1490. With all boxes ticked, does it all get in the way of enjoying what, at heart, should be a car that titillates and thrills at a more base level? Not a bit. Okay, maybe a little bit, especially with the odd wobble such as an occasional refusal to downshift on request in manual mode. That’s distracting on the road and downright alarming when you’re trying to settle the car into a corner on the track. Meanwhile, the Volkswagen Group policy of preventing brake/throttle overlap may be appropriate on a Dsgequipped Polo, but it’s damned irritating in a track-focused supercar when you’ve trailed the brakes with your left foot and want to blend in some stabilising throttle with your right but the request is denied, leaving you coasting in limbo for what feels like an eternity.
Such irritations are more or less drowned out by a naturally aspirated V10 closing on 8000rpm inches behind your head. From the driver’s seat (or anywhere within a couple of miles), that engine is a standout feature of this car. Need reminding why turbos, effective as they are, can never truly compete with a good old-fashioned atmospheric engine? A few hundred yards in a Performante should do the trick.
Throttle response is just fabulous. The merest twitch of your toe unleashes a mayhem of valve-train thrash, sounds of fuel and air being sucked into the manifolds and epic exhaust noise. And with it, an instant reaction through the chassis. That softness in the regular Huracán? Gone.
In Corsa mode, the turn-in is leagues better. With aero vectoring effectively dragging the car into the corner by putting more downforce on the inside rear wheel, you need less lock than you think to hit the apex and the car turns in assertively and aggressively with the slightest twitch of your wrists. It’s different from a Ferrari’s super-quick rack and feels more like the four-wheel steering systems currently all the rage. And although there’s not a great
deal of feel through the Alcantaraclad wheel, you do feel like you have something to lean against and therefore the confidence to exploit that amazing throttle response.
Through fast direction changes like the left-right-left chicane that has tamed the infamous Tamburello corner, you can feel the ALA system keeping the tyres keyed into the track, rewarding ever bolder throttle inputs. Eventually, the Corsas start going off and the Performante falls into slight oversteer. But even at these speeds, it’s not scary and is easily caught, the all-wheel drive system pulling you out of it if you’re willing to keep the throttle pinned.
There’s compliance in the chassis, too, so you can ride the kerbs and really fling it around. If there is a wild side to the Performante, it’s very well hidden. The difference between the contrived stiffness and aggression of the previous Gallardo Superleggera and a more pukka track set-up geared towards lap times is self-evident.
So it proves on a quick foray onto the public road. For all its blistering track pace, the Performante is a surprisingly fun road car, too, the increased feedback actually giving you more than the regular Huracán. You can actually drive it slower and get more sense of speed, which sounds strange but is a characteristic common to many cars of this type, from the Speciale to the Mclaren 675LT. Drive it in Strada on the road and it’s like a regular Huracán with a big wing on the back – with the knowledge that in Corsa it’s a totally different animal.
And here lies the Performante’s real talent. It does all you’d want of a hardcore Lamborghini in terms of noise, visual spectacle and camera-phone-teasing excitement around town. But it combines that with a dazzling array of technology, expertly calibrated to make you feel like a true driving god capable, if you had the inclination, to go full Mapelli and trot out a sub-seven lap of the ’Ring without breaking a sweat. Where supercars – Lamborghinis especially – once set out to challenge, their primary goal is now to flatter those of average ability while giving something back to those who really know what they’re doing. Unlike any Huracán before, the Performante now caters to the latter as much as it does the former.