How Do You Like Your Speed?
A brief guide to the latest exotics
SHAKEN:
LAMBORGHINI HURACÁN PERFORMANTE Do you really need another brightly coloured Lamborghini with a big wing? Aren’t you tired of that gratuitous excess yet?
To that we say: hell no! Have you ever turned into a corner at over 200 km/h while braking and felt the rear wheels go light? In that moment, the car seems to float across the pavement and your brain goes numb.
No? Well, my friends, that’s living. You never get tired of that feeling. The point of said big wing on this particular Lamborghini — the Huracán Performante — is to get you, me, and any other mere mortal to that knife edge where the car floats between in and out of control. The Performante lives in the danger zone.
The regular Huracán is a tad soft — a flashy cruiser. This one is a race car with license plates. The clever folks in the factory in Sant’agata invented a very brilliant thing — officially Aerodinamica Lamborghini Attiva, but you can just call it magic — that harnesses air flowing over the car to keep it stable. It varies airflow on either side independently many times per second to make the car do the impossible. This new technology is why the Performante is among the fastest supercars around the Nürburgring, able to beat cars with nearly double its horsepower and triple its price tag.
You and I are mere tourists in the danger zone. The Performante’s brilliant aerodynamic trickery — the likes of which have never been seen on any roadgoing car before — are what allows us to visit. It’s easy to drive faster than you ever thought possible because this Lambo always feels so stable. It reacts with lightning reflexes and cleans up your clumsy mistakes, letting its driver simply enjoy the moment. The danger zone, without the danger. Maverick and Iceman, eat your hearts out.
STIRRED:
ASTON MARTIN DB11 V8 Meet the most beautiful car in the world. Aston Martin’s DB11 is all but guaranteed to send anyone who sets eyes on it off in pursuit of an MBA and a bigger paycheque. Designer Merek Reichman deserves a knighthood for this noble work.
The car’s online configurator — which lets you audition combinations of leather interior, contrast stitching, and two-tone paint — is borderline NSFW. Log on and there goes your workday.
And not that we need another reason to love the DB11, but there are now two of them. The range-topping V12 is joined by a V8 model. But before you write the new model off as second-best, you should know that it’s actually the better driver of the pair. Hear us out.
It’s all about weight. The DB11 V8 is 115 kilograms lighter, with most of the weight coming off the front axle. It handles sharper, carving corners with newfound precision — without sacrificing the cushy suspension that makes the DB11 such an excellent daily driver.
True, the V8 isn’t as strong. It has “only” 503 horsepower compared to 600 from the V12. But because the V8 is lighter, it’s just 0.1 seconds slower from 0 to 100 km/h, doing that sprint in four seconds flat. Unlike the V12, which was designed in-house, the new V8 is lifted from Mercedes-amg. A German engine in a British car: old fuddy-duddies may choke on their pipes, but it’s a perfect pairing.
The hardest question, the one we’ve been avoiding, is which DB11 should you get? That’s like trying to choose between your children, so don’t. We’d get both. Now, if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got to go study if we’re going to get that Devry MBA.