80 http://www.evoIndia.com | July 2019
and mental. 8500rpm is full-on explosive. It’s deafening to
be honest; if I weren’t concentrating on driving this thing
as fast as I dare, I’d have noticed the onset of deafness.
The Performante’s fury is just staggering. You wonder
what in God’s name can drive anybody so mad as to
create something like this! And then you say thank you to
whoever he, or she, was.
So what have they created? The Huracan’s V10 engine
gets a new intake, titanium valves, a lighter and freer-
flowing exhaust and power is modestly bumped up to a
not-so-modest 630bhp — the same spec than now goes
into the Huracan Evo. What the Evo doesn’t get is the
Performante’s aero. The ALA (Aerodinamica Lamborghini
Attiva) system is like DRS in a Formula 1 car, switching
between low-drag mode and high-downforce as and when
you need it. An electric motor in the front spoiler opens
flaps that, in high-downforce mode, allows air though it.
When ALA is active, the air is diverted under the car thus
reducing drag and downforce. At the rear there are ducts
beneath the engine cover that open to channel air through
the (hollow) wings rather than over it and also aid drag
reduction. And the really clever bit is the Performante
can do this trick on one side or the other, thus increasing
downforce on the inside wheels while giving less drag on
the outside for better cornering aero.
There’s no switch to turn it on or off to gauge the
difference in performance but there’s a number that proves
all this work — 6 minutes 52.1 seconds — the Performante’s
Nurburgring Nordschleife lap record. And in Kerala’s green
hell, wow, it handles! While in the GT3 I could feel like I
was making the car work, the Performante corners like on
the cliched rails. The lack of body movement, the lack of
roll, it is all very unnerving. Your eyes are processing mad
speeds and your body is reeling under mad cornering g’s
but there is no body roll, no sign of the car approaching its
limit to accompany it all. That can’t be right, says the brain,
before rebooting itself. And this car isn’t even on the lap
record-setting Trofeo R tyres, Ashique laughing at what
he was quoted for those optional tyres. Wise man. On the
dry roads there’s no way of getting to the grip limit of these
tyres, forget the Trofeo R’s. The enormous mechanical
grip of the all-wheel drive powertrain and the aero add-
ons means the cornering is always flat, you can get on thegas at the exit with zero fear of understeer, and on top of
that is the naturally-aspirated V10 that has the screech,
the throttle response, and the potential to yank your hairs
right out of their roots, something no turbo’d motor can
ever hope to match.WITH THE SUN NICE AND BRIGHT WE VEER OFF
NH 766 to a secluded mountain road Ashique has recently
discovered and waits for the crew to catch up. It’s a long
wait and it gives us the time to talk about the story line I
had in mind. Porsche vs Lamborghini, which car wins I ask
him. He fires the question right back at me. Now, hard as we
might deny it, we always have our preconceived notions,
our personal favourites, and for me it has always been the
Porsche. More so because the GT3 has motorsport written
all over its wings. In the morning I’d even texted the cover
headline to our art director, ‘Porsche beats Lamborghini’.
But as you’d have noticed that didn’t make the cover because
that’s not true. Matter of fact, neither is the opposite true.
The GT3 had me smiling the widest possible smile without
my teeth falling out. In the Performante I laughed like I’d
smoked the herbs that are said to grow in these hills.
Of course if I could buy only one I’d still buy the GT3,
it is more of a driver’s car and less of a supermodel than
the Lambo, but there’s no denying the death star pull of
the Performante. Just look at it! God it makes you weak
in the knees. It also busts your knees, getting in and out
of it, but nobody said dating a supermodel was going to
be a walk in the park. It is pornographic, so much so that
Ashique had to get his in black to tone down the stares it
draws. Except the way he drives, you’ll hear him arriving
from twenty miles away. And he drives it everywhere. To
work. To the barber. Pre-dawn low-flying-missile runs into
the forests. Afternoon blasts back to Calicut slicing like
greased lightning through typically thick Kerala traffic,
me in hot pursuit yet getting rapped for not driving fast
enough. He asks if I want to take a short cut and dives down
a narrow path through a tea estate, nose lift on both the
cars activated, a road I’d hesitate to take a regular car over,
forget a Lambo in convoy with a Porsche. Ashique’s answer
to where you can drive fast cars is every-bloody-where! LBelow: ALA aero system is what enables the Performante’s record-
setting Nurburgring lap time