Can the outlandish end-of-era, end-of-days Huracán Sterrato really hack it in the rough stuff ? R ichard Lane puts Lamborghini’s improbable rally raider to the test

PHOTOGR APHY JACK HARRISON

This will sound demented, but with the Huracán Sterrato, it’s possible to forget what it is you’re driving. This Lamborghini, to be clear, has an 8500rpm V10, banana-sized shift paddles and a header rail so low it might as well be resting in your lap. These traits are quintessentially hardcore supercar. But how, then, can there be times during our 385-mile Welsh odyssey when it feels no more obtrusive than a BMW M3 on the smallest available wheel, with dampers in their most languid state?

You won’t automatically find the answer by looking at the spec sheet, though there are, for a modern supercar, some surprising and unflattering statistics. For one thing, the Sterrato has the honour of being the slowest mid-engined product in Lamborghini’s history. Were you to drive both cars flat out alongside one another, a P400 Miura would begin to pull away from its nearly twice as powerful descendent.

The tyres are equally unserious but begin to build a picture: 40-section sidewalls all round? Jeez. You have to rewind to the days of the Ferrari 360 to find such ballooning rubber in a class all about the precision-disgorgement of power onto the road. Some extra-curricular, pre-flight digging unearths another improbable detail: that the Sterrato has 171mm of ground clearance. This puts it in the same sphere as the Skoda Yeti.

Of course, you will find similar numbers on the spec sheets of many performance SUVs and yet they still contrive to ride like a Cessna in a bomb cyclone. But the Sterrato could hardly be more different. On all but the very worst surfaces, it nonchalantly floats along in its own pocket of calm. With their big engines nestled well between the axles, supercars do tend to have forgiving spring rates. Under the war paint, aero elements and beady eyes, they are often quite delicate things. But even compared with the regular Huracán Evo, the Sterrato’s spring rates are some 25% softer with about 30% more travel.

These changes stake fresh territory for supercars. So light is the Sterrato’s touch on a British country road that it borders on the tender. So velvety is the steering response that the point at which the car stops moving in a straight line and begins to arc into a change of heading isn’t something of which you are ever particularly conscious. It all means that when you have defanged the powertrain in Strada mode (shortshifting gearbox, exhaust valves closed, longest effective throttle), the Sterrato is confoundingly easy company when just getting from A to B. And that’s when you forget what you’re driving.