CROUCHING TIGER

SANTTAGATA POWERS ITS BABY BULL TO 470kW COURTESY f OF THE PERFORMANTE POWERPLANT, BUT ALSO PROMISES A CHASSIS TO MATCH gWITH NEW ALL-WIREEL STEERING

- DYLAN CAMPBELL

THIS HAPPENS OFTEN in car company land. A whiz-bang new halo model emerges and then, what feels like only a year later, the base model is facelifted and gets all the goodies of the previous halo car, which now seems a bit dated. Coincidence? More like cleverness — car companies know what they're doing.

Case in point: the new Lamborghini Huracan Evo. More than the Huracan’s biggest update since its launch in 2014, the Evo is a Performante in everything but name — and one other major exception which we'll get to. That means it’s in with the Performante engine, the most aggressive iteration of the Lamborghini/Audi 5.2-litre V10 yet. A redesigned inlet tract and higher-lift intake cams with titanium valves — and presumably some ECU fiddling — combines with the existing 12.7:1 compression ratio and 8500rpm maximum engine speed for a fairly staggering 470kW at 8000rpm and 600Nm at 6500rpm, up 21kW/40Nm on the outgoing LP610-4.

The seven-speed dual-clutch paddleshift transmission remains though in fairness it had little room for improvement, while the big news in the chassis department is the fitment of the Performante’s trick rear-steering system. Lamborghini, meanwhile, has ditched the previous letters/numbers naming convention — to make the cars more marketable, it says — so you and I would be the only ones calling it the new LP640-4.

That, of course, was the Performante’s name under the previous naming convention, yet the Evo differs in one significant way and it’s not just the lack of super-sticky Pirelli P-Zero Trofeo R tyres — no, don’t think your Evo is going to set a 6:52.01 around the Nordschleife, unless you retrofit the Performante’s Aerodinamica Lamborghini Attiva (ALA) active aerodynamics, of which the Evo misses out entirely.