What’s troubling me is the realisation that the Evo
doesn’t offer the amusingly termed Ego mode as seen
in the Aventador S and SVJ, and also the Urus: in other
words, anindividualmode inwhich I can tailor the car to
how I want it, when I want. I’m already wondering if this
will be a real issue, because with so many fundamental
elements of the car’s dynamics governed by LDVI – not
just, for example, the ride quality – an inability to match
car with road could have significant ramifications.
In Sport mode, the deep-chested growl of the V10 at
cruising revs gets a little wearing after a while,boring, as
it does, somewhere deep in your skull. More to the point,
the damping is definitely on the firm side, particularly
if the surface isn’t great, where you really notice the
abrupt rebound by the way your body is jiggled around.
Returning to Strada gives me the reasonably compliant
damping, and the quiet exhaust, but it also gives me light
and weirdly disconnected steering; it’s not bad once on
lock, but the weighting away from the straight-ahead is
very artificial, as is the self-centring (Sport and Corsa
are more direct, witha better build-up of weight, but still
offer no feel whatsoever). Furthermore, as the M56 starts
to give way to more scenic, verdant A-roads, I miss the
snappy gearshifts of Sport, having to make do withslurred,
less definite changes instead.
Time to try Sport again, then. However, it soon becomes
clear that it makes the exhaust note simply too loud to be
used often. Yes, I feel like that’s an astonishingly un-evo
thing to say, but this is a car where people can hear you
coming from quite literally miles away, and this isn’t Sicily
in the 1960s, with a swarthy chap wearing baggy slacks
and a flat cap making wind-her-up motions with his arm
by the roadside: this is the UK in 2019, and driving quickly,
responsibly, albeit potentially not quite to the letter of the
law, for fun, needs to be approached with a more sensitive
mindset if it’s not inevitably to end in at the very least
confrontation and open hostility. The ironic postscript to
allof this is that withthis exhaust, there’s no way the Evo is
going to make it onto any trackday in the UK.
Once we’re in the Peaks, the roads become really tough.
They’re often quite narrow, which immediately puts the
Evo on the defensive, because it always feels a big, chunky