Twin test: Urus Performante vs Cayenne Turbo GT

Usual super SUVs not your thing? These tauter, more extreme 4x4s are as mad as family cars get [for now...]

- Ollie Marriage

What role does a super SUV perform? I thought I'd nailed it. The ultimate winter supercar: a high-rise family hauler to see over the snowdrifts, make enough noise to trigger avalanches in distant valleys and generally blitz all roads. And not-roads the new Urus Performante has a Rally mode.

And then the Cayenne Turbo GT turned up on Pirelli Corsa track day tyres. The Lambo wasn't on winter rubber, but tyres a notch back from the Porsche's. The truth of it is that super SUVS are no more suited to winter than any other supercar. It's not the quality of engineering, it's the quality of contact patches.

Both Lamborghini and Porsche are part of the wider VW empire, so both use the same 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 base engine and insert it into the same MLB Evo platform that underpins everything from the Bentley Bentayga to the Audi e-tron and A4. It's not all chummy in the group though. Porsche and Lambo both want to claim dibs on building the most dynamic SUV.

For Porsche this meant a Cayenne Coupe with the Turbo S's hybrid gubbins stripped off and plenty of GT department know-how thrown at it. Mainly by the marketing department. Hence the Corsa tyres. Plus standard carbon ceramic brakes, rear-steer and stronger pistons, timing chain, crankshaft and boost pressure for the V8. Its 631bhp is up 89bhp on the standard Cayenne Turbo. Torque has climbed 59lb ft while 0-62mph has fallen 0.6secs to 3.3.