Lamborghini Huracan Performante Spyder Blasts Through Canyon Roads
Going top-down in a Performante Spyder looks like a great way to spend a cold winter morning.
The right car can give you a satisfying driving experience. But it takes more than just a brilliant vehicle to have an unforgettable time behind the wheel. You have to be on the right road at the perfect time of day to have one of those drives that you can’t shut up about. It looks as if The Smoking Tire‘s Matt Farah had one of those drives in the 2018 Lamborghini Huracan Performante Spyder.
It didn’t start out perfectly, though. It was a cold day, but for some reason, Farah had the top down. That’s because he had to. According to Farah, “The room for the soft top, which folds behind the seats here, that room has come out of the cabin. So you lose some legroom.” Even with the seats all the way back, Farah’s head would be scraping the underside of the roof, so he chose to lower it to make things easier on himself.
All of that seems insignificant once Farah is out on the unpopulated roads that wind through the San Gabriel Mountains. He can hear the Spyder’s naturally aspirated 5.2-liter V10 at full volume and every crack and burble from the dual exhausts that exit out of the middle of the angular rear end. As he plays hide and seek with the sun on his circuitous route through the natural beauty of SoCal, Farah points out how wonderfully old-school his $360,000 test car is. “No turbos here. No hybrid systems. Just 8,500 naturally-aspirated RPM.”
ALSO SEE: Lamborghini Huracan Performante Spyder Review: Wild, Insane and Perfect
The further Farah goes, the more he finds to like about the Spyder. It grips and holds the cold roads well while its suspension does a great job of neutralizing the worst parts of the pavement. Farah thinks back to the E-Gear system of Lambos past and says, “The dual-clutch gearbox is really a staggeringly good evolution of this system.” In Strada mode, the seven-speed unit delivers imperceptibly smooth shifts. They remain silky in Sport mode and have just the right amount of force to them when the Spyder is set to Corsa.
The real stand-out feature – as it should be – is the engine, especially when Farah zooms through a tunnel at 5,500 rpm. He marvels at the fact that Lamborghini took its V10 engine from 5.0 liters and 500 horsepower in the Gallardo to 5.2 liters and 640 horsepower in the Huracan Performante without adding forced induction. Farah’s fast driving gives him several opportunities to realize that Lamborghini has matched that ample power with carbon-ceramic brakes that are immediately easy to modulate.
As Farah drives toward the sun and the next curve in driving paradise, he exclaims, “What a glorious automobile this is.” And what an unforgettable day and road to test it on.
Join the 6SpeedOnline forums today!
