Cars

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

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Lamborghini

A coronavirus may be keeping us all from visiting most of the typical exotic travel destinations, but thankfully driving exotic cars is still a possibility. Lamborghini, probably the quintessential exotic car maker, put on another one of their yearly Esperienza Lamborghini events and let us stretch the legs of their screaming Huracan Evo on the lovely Moscow Raceway track.

It’s fair to say that Lamborghini has been doing well lately. Their year-on-year sales have been on an upward trajectory for a decade, quintupling production since 2011. And since they launched their super SUV, Urus, the curve has bent upwards even steeper as they’ve more than doubled the amount of cars they sell in the past two years. That’s got to make the shareholders very happy indeed. Still, as we were at a race track, we put the massive success story that is Lamborghini’s SUV and stuck to their most nimble model — the Huracan Evo.

Lamborghini Huracan Evo

Now, we were actually supposed to also drive the newly released Huracan Evo RWD, the slightly more hardcore rear-wheel-drive version, but for some reason or other those plans ended up being changed and the regular all-wheel-drive Huracan Evo would have to do. I was actually rather curious how much better the RWD was going to be, as removing the front driveshafts and some weight from a car that is already fairly brilliant could only have helped things. But in any case, there was still plenty to look forward to. It’s not like one tires easily of driving any Lamborghini no matter how familiar it is.

Lamborghini Huracan Evo

In fact, I seemed to remember that the last time I drove one of these rocketships on a racetrack it was such a hot day that the tires were having a very hard time generating sufficient grip which made pushing the limits a bit of a struggle. This time, while the sun was out, we were only a little past the 20 degree mark which would make the tires run cooler and give the 5 liter V10 cooler and therefore more oxygen-rich air to generate horsepower from. Happier car, happier driver.

Lamborghini Huracan Evo

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.

Lamborghini Huracan Evo

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.

Lamborghini Huracan Evo
Lamborghini Huracan Evo
Lamborghini Huracan Evo

On the whole though, the Huracan Evo has very benign and predictable handling characteristics which means almost anyone can go fast in it. Which is probably the point when you’re selling as many supercars as they do. It also means that the slightly more experienced drivers can confidently turn off all the electronic nannies and not worry about crashing. As long as you don’t provoke it unnecessarily, this particular bull certainly won’t try to kill you. What it will do is fire out of corners and then shove you down the next straight at a rate of knots that is both impressive and somewhat deceptive. It all happens so easily and with such linearity that you have to stay conscious about not missing your braking points. When you have a moment to look down onto the fully digital dashboard, the number it is displaying is invariably quite a bit greater than what you expected to see. On the longest straight of Moscow Raceway, the Huracan Evo easily touched 260 kilometers per hour, and that was with a somewhat delayed throttle application and early braking point due to the instructor’s car in front. It’s fa-ha-ha-ha-ast.

Lamborghini Huracan Evo

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.

Lamborghini Huracan Evo
02 сентября 2020
Jan Coomans для раздела Cars