Driven: Lambo's new Murciélago

The all-new Lamborghini Murciélago replacement won’t be launched until next March. But Lambo asked Steve Sutcliffe to join them in a secret sign-off test at Nardo in Italy. Cue a mad 210mph in the dark…

A garage door opens, writes Sutcliffe, and at that instant all conversation ceases. Before us, wearing heavy disguise that consists mostly of matt black duct tape atop four monumentally huge wheels and tyres, sits the future of Lamborghini – the very first prototype for the all-new V12 supercar that will replace the legendary Murciélago.

This is the car that will define what Lamborghini means to the rest of the world for at least the next 10 years. And it’s a car, or at least the prototype of a car, that I’ll be driving in less than half an hour’s time.

12 March 2009 1.04amIt has taken me two days of fairly grim travelling to get here – ‘here’ being the Nardo test track in southern Italy. At this stage Lamborghini isn’t allowed to give too much away. We know the tub is made entirely from carbonfibre and that the suspension is of single-seater-style pushrod design, both firsts for any Lamborghini.

What we don’t know – and what Maurizio won’t yet tell us — is what the car weighs. “If a Murciélago weighs nearly 1700kg with a conventional backbone chassis,” says Lamborghini’s main man, Maurizio Reggiani, “and you already know the new car has a carbonfibre tub because I just told you it does, how much do think the damned thing weighs?”

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12 March 2009 1.25amI press the big starter button on the console and the all-new Lamborghini erupts into life, much like every other Lamborghini erupts into life: with an enormous burst of revs, like it or not. But immediately I notice several new characteristics.

The sound from the engine and exhaust is smoother and less grainy than in a Murciélago, somehow. And the response from the crank when I blip the throttle is massively more immediate. Before it has even moved, this car feels both more refined and less physically intimidating than of old – less, dare I say it, like a rough old diamond from the good old days and more like a normal kind of supercar. One you’d half expect to see from the more extreme edges of a company like Volkswagen.

And that’s before you so much as mention the cabin, or the driving position, both of which are hugely more resolved than in the Murciélago.

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12 March 2009 1.28amThe moment it moves, the new Lambo feels every bit as advanced dynamically as it does aesthetically inside. The ride is calm and controlled in a way that a Murciélago owner simply wouldn’t recognise. It glides quietly over ground that the old car shimmies and thumps across.