Lamborghini Huracán Performante

By Mustaqim Jaed at February 12, 2021 Post a Comment

Can Lamborghini’s lighter, harder-hitting Huracán really mix it with £1m hypercars? Six minutes 52.1 seconds. Those numbers are the reason why the Lamborghini Huracán Performante is here awaiting our thorough examination.We want to understand how this naturally aspirated, conventional supercar can apparently lap the Nürburgring Nordschleife – the home of one of the industry’s preferred performance benchmarks – faster than the recent crop of hypercars.It has done so without a horsepower figure beginning with a nine. It has done so without electrical assistance, which would fill any torque gap left by an astonishingly highly tuned or turbocharged engine.It just has less weight, a bit more power, a bit more aero and apparently a lot more chassis deftness than the usual Huracán.This wasn’t meant to happen. There are other cars in the Volkswagen Group that are designed specifically to be harder, faster, more powerful, massively more expensive and far more technologically advanced than any Lamborghini. And yet, during October last year, Lamborghini test driver Marco Mapelli – clearly quite a handy driver because he also recorded a sub-seven-minute lap in a Lamborghini Aventador SV – manhandled the Huracán around.It isn’t easy to find an opportunity to set a Nürburgring lap time because the place is so busy.Mapelli took one of the 15-minute slots set aside for very fast laps at the end of an ‘industry pool’ test day and did one warm-up lap followed by a fast lap to record a time so quick that some people disbelieved it.We can do rather better than that here. We had use of our test track for two hours straight. We also have independent test times set by the chief alternatives – McLaren’s P1 and the Porsche 918 Spyder.So let’s see if the Huracán is the fastest-lapping production car of the moment – and, because or despite of that, how good it remains as a road-going supercar.