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Four laps over two sessions on a damp MMRT, that’s all I’ve got to get to grips with the latest evolution of Lamborghini’s mid-engined V10, aptly suffixed Evo. Overnight rains have left a couple of puddles, notably into the fast entry of C4, and dark clouds over the track look threatening. The thunder though, is coming from the pit lane as three Huracan Evos are warmed up, the N-O-I-S-E leading to plenty of whinging among the pit lane tigers over the imminent demise of nat-asp engines. Somebody ought to send them all a memo to live in the now and enjoy what we have!
Anyway, contort and drop into the Huracan — it’s never been an elegant car to get into and the Evo is no different — and click the Anima into full Corsa. We’re going to be led like children round the MMRT but at least the pace car is driven by Armaan Ebrahim and I know him well enough, and importantly he knows me well enough, so our two laps will not be lukewarm. Only problem, he’s in an Urus.
How do you make an Urus seem slow? Chase it with a Huracan Evo! Armaan accelerates hard out onto the track and it takes hardly any effort to dive into his diffuser. Behind my ears is the upgraded V10 from the Performante — the mega-winged, carbonfibre-lathered, devilishly shrieking monster that blew us away over Kerala’s roads two months ago (evo India, July 2019). It boosts the regular Huracan’s 602bhp to 631bhp while the torque is ramped up by 20Nm to 600Nm. The 0-100kmph time is now 2.9 seconds and courtesy all-wheel drive you’ll get those sub-3 second launches no matter what the track condition. What the Evo doesn’t get is the Performante’s trick ALA aerodynamics so the former’s lap records are still safe, though out here it makes no difference. The Evo is plenty quick for the MMRT and the directness, not to mention the response of the steering is like greased lightning. A nudge on the steering wheel and we’re on the apex of C2; full gas and I’m back to admiring the underside of the Urus. For all of Armaan’s wheelsmanship, I still have to lift off on the short straight after the S, the Evo is crazy fast.
Into C4, I’m on the Urus’ tail, and then I’m blinded. I can’t see the puddle Armaan has splashed through and for a brief instant panic grips me. I scramble around for the wiper stalk (it’s a motorcycle-like button on the steering wheel) while my brain is on full-alert to catch the inevitable slide. Nothing happens! As we run through the technical back section of the MMRT, avoid the standing water on the apex of the big-D, the Evo stays planted like a Himalayan rock. The stability afforded by the all-wheel drive system is incredible, even over the wet patches it doesn’t slip and slide, and all this isn’t at the expense of typical AWD understeer. In fact, you do feel the rear-bias to the torque distribution and if Armaan hadn’t warned us not to touch the ESP button, on pain of never, ever being allowed within 10 feet of a Lamborghini, we’d be oversteering round some of the greasy corners. Apparently, even with ESP on, we’d be oversteering (a bit) if we’d left the Anima in the mid-way Sport setting — the LDVI system letting you pull decent enough drifts if it knows you’re in control of the car. In Corsa it’s fully focused on the fastest lap time, no drama, no waste of time. And that’s where the predictive aspect of the Evo comes in.
Lamborghini Dinamica Veicolo Integrata uses feed-forward logic and a single (electronic) brain for the AWD, adaptive dampers, stability control, rear wheel steering and torque vectoring, to predict the driver’s intentions and adjust the Evo’s responses. I honestly cannot tell you that I felt the LDVI at work but then again that’s how the best electronic systems work, quietly and without intrusion, in the background, ensuring you’re never on the grass. In fact I’m not sure what to credit, the chassis tweaks or the LDVI, but the Huracan Evo is just astonishingly quick round the MMRT — along with the sky-high grip there’s a neutral-balance and monster, gale-force power. In Corsa, the 7-speed twin-clutch hammers in violent shifts, the turn of speed is just amazing, and before I know it my two laps are done and we’re cooling the brakes. At which point I realise we haven’t worked the brakes hard enough to give you any meaningful feedback.
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Trundling into the pits I notice the new infotainment, a big touchscreen replacing the old Audi MMI controls and finally introducing Apple CarPlay to the Huracan. There’s a read out for the LDVI, and you can even connect two cameras to analyse the data and video from your track day. All of this makes the Evo more liveable than the regular Huracan, better looking, more desirable and considerably harder hitting in the performance department. Which is all I can tell you over four laps.
