Sussex to Sant'Agata: taking the Lamborghini Huracan Performante home

The violence can be suppressed and then electronically drip-fed in via three driving modes – Strada, Sport and histrionic Corsa – along with your right ankle’s angle of attack, but you do have a choice. Question is, should there ever be a choice with cars as beautifully unhinged as the Huracán Performante? Everywhere we go, the reaction to its sinful LED headlights, prehistoric silhouette and rear plumage is the same. People turn, their mouths fall open and the hand then points. In Italy, that’s your cue to pull both paddles, dropping the transmission in neutral, and depress the accelerator. The visible enjoyment of everyone else tells you two things. First, unlike aristocratic Ferrari and po-faced Porsche, the cars that mad Lamborghini builds are strangely classless, like Hawaiian shirts. They’re the good guys: everybody loves them. Second, supercars will always capture the imagination and reveal something about the person who sees one go by. 

Returning to the question, I think most people would rather cars like this left us tired and aching but wired and desperate for another hit, rather than frustrated by a perceived lack of grit. But if a sweet spot between does exist, our route to Italy gives ample opportunity to see whether the Performante nails it. 

There is the autobahn, which we pick up at Kradenbach in the Rhineland. It’s a theatre in which the Performante actually does pretty well, with its speed, soft mid-engined-style spring rates and reasonable 25mpg cruising economy; this from a 5.2-litre naturally aspirated V10 that will go down as one of the greatest-ever road-car engines. Later on we’ll reach Baden-Baden, from where the evocatively named Black Forest High Road flows southeast, wide and smooth over low, densely wooded mountains. Day two sees us over the much more technical Silvretta Pass in Austria before heading to Innsbruck, then down into the wealthy, industrialist plains of northern Italy and Lamborghini’s hometown. It’s about 1200 miles all-in, further than many owners will drive these cars annually. More fool them. 

Two-hundred miles evaporate and we reach the Black Forest at sunset, where the Performante performs its party piece, which is to rip into the road surface with Pirelli tyres that feel more like crampons and allow you to get the digital tacho whirring like a Catherine wheel. The chassis won’t freely adopt little slip angles like a Ferrari 488 Pista and doesn’t do the same gratifying rear-flavoured poise as a Porsche GT2 RS, but the grip and millimetric accuracy with which you can aim the cartoonishly fanged nose is astounding. 

It feels intuitive, too; not like an Aventador, which adds to the general air of excitement by making you guess just how much grip is left. The younger brother is a more condensed machine that will let you coax it close to the white lines – closer than perhaps any other supercar. And when you also have an 8750rpm engine of this calibre at your disposal, having confidence in your ability to place the car so precisely makes it easy not only to like, but to love, almost unconditionally. These are the first genuinely good roads on this trip and it takes the Lamborghini all of three third-gear corners to remind us that it is the definitive get-in-and-go-wild supercar.