Cars with Jan Coomans. Esperienza Lamborghini — just what the doctor ordered

Whether you’re sitting in a pit lane or your own driveway, starting up a Huracan is an event in and of itself. One press of the fairly dramatically designed start button and the car’s large naturally aspirated heart fires up with a bark that properly wakes you up if you weren’t already. Then, the first thing you do is switch the car into at least Sport mode, as normal mode seems to exist only to please some bureaucrats and their pesky regulations. But as we were in fact on a track, Corsa mode was the obvious choice. If there is one thing I’d maybe like to add to this whole mode business, it’s an individual setting. The way it is now, the settings are slightly inflexible and I could imagine someone wanting to mix and match some of the features of each mode setting. For example, maybe you’re on a bit of a rough mountain road so you want the dampers soft but you’d also like the exhaust to be loud, but you can’t have that. Nor can you let the gearbox decide when to shift in Corsa mode which only offers fully manual control over the shifting.

Of course, you’d probably want to have it that way anyway. The Huracan Evo is a very, very fun and entertaining machine to drive flat out but it’s not really meant to chase the last couple of tenths in a competitive environment. I suspect we’ll see a successor to the more track-focused Huracan Performante sooner or later to fill that niche. While the current Evo is pretty much as fast as the old Performante was, I did find it slightly less intuitive to drive probably because of the rear wheel steering. You can feel the computers trying to help you out and find some more speed by slightly adjusting where the rear wheels are pointing, but the result is not an entirely natural sensation and without any time to get used to it I was having to adjust the steering angle mid-corner rather often. The car also had a slight tendency to wag its tail under hard braking from high speeds. In these areas, one imagines that the Huracan RWD would offer a somewhat more purist experience, which is of course why Lamborghini has decided to produce it in the first place.

It’s so fast, in fact, that it’s hard to take in the sensory assault that the Huracan is doing on your body. Its V10 engine is still a masterpiece that we’ll be talking about for years, probably decades, to come. The dual-clutch gearbox rattles through its 7 gears as if it’s late for a Christmas dinner. And the whole car looks, well, rather stunning. No need to buy it in an eye-damaging shade of green or orange though — it’s not like a more subtle color will suddenly make a Huracan unnoticeable. Attracting a decent level of attention is simply inescapable in a car with a shape this sublime. In fact, it’s very possible to get a tad jealous of the people outside of the car as they can see it a whole lot more clearly than you can from the inside. At least until, two nanoseconds later, you realize that you’re not a little bit lucky to be actually driving it.