Lamborghini Essenza SCV12

A $2.5 MILLION SCREAMING GOOD TIME.

- Mac Morrison

Modern Lamborghini has a habit of milking its series-production cars for all they're worth to create re-bodied and mechanically upgraded limited editions. So it's not terribly difficult to sometimes take a cynic's view that the company relishes finding easy ways to tap into its richest clients' hedge funds or crypto accounts rather than developing truly new machines, the type of cars we might remember as vividly as the ones on which Lamborghini made its name.

So we were thrilled to discover the Essenza SCV12 is a long way from being a re-bodied and retuned production model. It's effectively a purpose-built race car, one whose point wasn't homologation for competition but rather to explore what's possible when unfettered by racing rules.

Lamborghini let us behind its F1-style wheel for 16 laps of Las Vegas Motor Speedway's 1.1-mile road course. The nine-turn circuit is more of a club track, largely taken in second or third gear, but the front straight allowed for speeds in the 140-mph ballpark before a challenging braking zone for the second-gear Turn I left-hander. The choice of venue and opportunity to run at whatever pace we wanted was enough to demonstrate Essenza's intriguing approachability for amateur drivers.

The starting procedure is simple but fun: Flip on the master switch, briefly let the electronics boot up, and push the ignition button followed by the start button. Once the 6.5-liter V-12 thrums to life, hold the brakes (left foot preferred), punch and hold the blue button on the steering wheel for neutral, and click the right shift paddle once to select the first gear in the Xtrac six-speed sequential manual racing 'box. (There's no clutch pedal.) Foot off the brake hit the throttle, and you're off.