Lord Of The Ring

The Lightweight Lamborghini Huracán Performante Puts Speed Demon Stephen Corby Through His Paces.

- Stephen Corby

It might not seem like it when you’re watching a clock, waiting for something painful to end – a school play, a dental procedure, watching The Notebook – but a second really is a very long time. In motorsport, it’s a lifetime.

The top half-dozen drivers in Formula One can often all be lapping within a single second of each another, meaning it’s the tenths of a second advantage their supreme skills give them that make the difference.

Supercar makers are also big fans of lap times when it comes to the sport of Comparative Gloating. The acknowledged home of this kind of showboating is a single racetrack in Germany, known as the Nürburgring, or, more emotively, The Green Hell. Whichever car currently holds the fastest time there is universally acknowledged as the current King of Speed.

There are several cars that can hurl from you from 0 to 100km/h in 2.9 seconds, as the new and terrifying Performante version of Lamborghini’s already awesome Huracán can, but there are a rarefied few that could get anywhere near its six-minute, 52-second lap time around The Ring (the notorious track has almost as many names as it has corners), where even getting close to seven minutes was long considered a sign of greatness.

What is really trippy about that time, however, is not that it beat all the other road-registrable cars before it, but that it was a whopping, barely believable 26 seconds faster than the basic Huracán.