The new less weight/more power little Lambo is here, the Huracán Performante. it makes a how-is-this-the-baby-of-the-range 631 brake horsepower and comes with some completely nutty active aero made with forged composite.
The mechanical specs of the car alone are wild. The car weighs nearly 90 pounds (40kg) less than a base Huracán thanks to carbon trim, Narvi 20-inch forged wheels, and I don’t know what else. The engine makes more horsepower than before and it makes it more available than before.
Lamborghini claims 631 bhp at 8,000 RPM and 442 lb-ft of torque at 6,500 RPM with 70 percent of torque available at 1,000. Springs are supposedly 10 percent stiffer, and radial and axial arm bushings are a stunning 50 percent stiffer, as Top Gear notes, whatever that means.
Lambo claims a not-any-faster-than-normal 2.9 second 0-62 time, as well as 0-124 mph in 8.9s, and a top speed somewhere beyond 202 mph.
Price, if you’re curious, is listed as £30K more than a base Huracan, at least in the UK. As to how much that figures to in the U.S. I can’t say, but this is more of a step than a leap in terms of cost.
What interests me most is the Lamborghini’s active aero system. Lambo dubs it Aerodinamica Lamborghini Attiva, which means Lamborghini active aero in Italian. Very neat.
Here’s how the system works, as TG explains:
The huge rear wing – one of the new forged carbon-fibre elements – is actually hollow, and the two upright supports have airboxes at their bases (which sit inboard, in the airflow at the base of the rear glass decklid) each containing motorised flaps.
The airboxes sweep up the fast-moving air from the decklid and flow it through the rear wing upright and into the wing itself. That speedy airflow then runs through the spoiler’s horizontal plane and is released through a narrow channel underneath its surface.
Because the forged carbon can be made into complex structures, each side of the wing has its own channel fed independently from the airbox on each respective side. With ALA active, the flow through the wing is optimised in different ways. Under heavy braking the airflow is stopped, leaving the wing to act traditionally, and keep the car balanced and planted.
When cornering, the system monitors the steering and yaw inputs and shuts off air to the inside to increase the downforce on that wheel, while opening the valve in the channel on the other. It’s active air braking downforce.
So the car is drawing air from inside the car to out by the wing, and stalls it side by side to keep the car cornering as fast as possible. This is like the flow-through aero we’ve been seeing from Ferrari and Aston Martin lately, taken to another level.
All of the ‘Ring Record nonsense is whatever as far as I’m concerned. This active aero is sweet.