94 CARMAGAZINE.CO.UK | OCTOBER 2019
William Hill stopped taking bets on the Huracan or 600LT winning SCGT
about six words ago. This whole feature is a fantasy daydream question
made real: which car would I pick for a final fang on a road like this? Not
even Marine Le Pen lay in bed as a kid gazing at posters of quick Renaults.
We’ll start with the Lamborghini Huracan Evo because, well, it’s as close
as any car here comes to looking like the cars we did have on our walls as
kids. The Evo tag is a misnomer in the modern shortened, bastardised
sense of the word. This is not some kind of new Performante stripped-out
flagship Huracan. It’s just a posh way of saying facelift. But drive it, and you
wonder if calling it Evo isn’t quite so disingenuous after all.
The cosmetic mods are minimal: new bumpers outside, and an angrier
rear with shoutier diffuser and a little bridge spoiler on the trailing edge
of the deck lid. Inside there’s a large touchscreen on the centre console.
Our car featured (optional) blue detailing on the sports seats that didn’t
match the (also optional) blue of the brake calipers. Other interior trims are
available, some of which look less like a set of £20 taxi-special seat covers.
Nosing out of the car park and taking it steady for the first few minutes
to give the oil and rubber a chance to limber up, the steering feels light
in weight and feel. There’s still a sneaking suspicion the Lambo is a
style-over-substance machine. But what style. The view through that
impossibly wide windscreen is so cinematic it ought to have black bars
at the top and bottom. Instead it’s got them pointing diagonally into the
frame. The A-pillars are huge and one of the reasons the Huracan is not a
particularly easy car to place on a narrow road.
But it’s much easier than it was, because it connects you to the road like
no standard Huracan has before. The much-maligned dynamic steering
(even Lambo engineers preferred the passive system) is now compulsory,
but it feels so much more natural in this incarnation. And the new rear-axle
steering hardware, first used to great effect on the Aventador, feels surpris-
ingly natural, too.
You need to toggle the three-mode Anima controller on the bottom
of the wheel before the Evo reveals its greater depth of character. Forget
Corsa, which is fine for tracks, but too stiff here. Choose sport instead and
the steering comes alive, the dampers tense a little and the LDVI brain that
co-ordinates everything gets the rear steering and torque vectoring func-
tions working together. The traction inspires massive confidence, as does a
brake pedal that feels soft and over-servoed next to the McLaren’s on track
but works better on the road, giving you a smarter immediate response. ⊲
Caution:
missile testing
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LAMb ORGh INI h URACAN E v O
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Sports Car Giant Test 2019
b y ChRIs ChILt ON
