While I've come to feel little more than downright disdain toward the vast majority of Italian cars we've tested here in Car of the Week, even someone like me can't help but to find the Nyanborghini Purracan irresistibly cool. The story goes that Canadian musician deadmau5 wrapped his Ferrari 458 Italia with a Nyan Cat livery, going as far as to replace the Ferrari badges on the car with Purrari badges. Now, of course, Ferrari being Ferrari, fiercely protective of their brand image, quickly C&Ded the man, in doing so causing more damage to their image than any pair of pixelated rainbow–farting cats could. And so what's a rich man to do in this trying situation but to buy a Lamborghini and wrap it in the very design that Ferrari was so vehemently against?
In essence, I think the Nyanborghini Purracan is the single coolest Lamborghini, at least in modern history, because it embodies the very spirit and sentiment that gave rise to Lamborghini as a car manufacturer to begin with: to do what Ferrari won't with a firm middle finger raised. And yes, in case you haven't figured it out by now, this livery is the entire reason why I bothered to choose an Italian car to begin with. I mean, I spent all this time making a livery for my own use, I might as well give myself the chance to actually
like the car as a whole, right?
deadmau5 Nyanborghini Purracan by XSquareStickIt livery link (GTS | GT7)
Even before it gets wrapped up in feline shenanigans though, the base Huracán looks
really promising on paper! It's brash styling masks a
deceptively tiny car, one that can
somehow house what I consider to be the idea drivetrain layout for a sports car: a big, but not too big, high revving NA engine mounted rear midship sending power to all four wheels via a close ratio
7 speed gearbox. With the blessing of Audi, this combination of the perfect drivetrain and diminutive body proved wildly successful both in sanctioned racing and production peacocking, with the Huracán GT3 scoring wins at Monza, Daytona, and Laguna Seca, and the Performante holding the
(rather pointless...) Nordschleife lap record at one point. It seems to me that, despite the Huracán being the "baby Lambo", the
flagship Aventador is only for showboating and
reskinning into various other overpriced models, whereas the Huracán is the work bull of the brand that gets called upon when things
actually need to get done. While usually the flagship car of a brand represents the very best and distilled essence of a manufacturer, it seems to me that we are yet to give modern Lamborghini a fair chance at an impression here in COTW until we've sampled its darling baby, the Huracán.
Even within the confines of Gran Turismo Sport, a game which ruthlessly distills away any sense of speed from the player, the Huracán is properly "HOLY BALLSACKS" fast in a straight line, even without feeling the g forces, motion blur, or camera pullbacks of going 0–100km/h in 3.2 seconds on its default Sport Hard tyres. Hell, 0–100 feels too shallow a test for the Huracán, because this thing just does
not stop pulling until 180km/h at the top of 4th gear. That's right—this 601HP supercar from 2015 feels like it has the first four gears of a
1999 Impreza with well over double the power of a 1999 Impreza, and ripping through 4 whole gears within 9 seconds, each time upshifting as near to the height of the NA V10's stratospheric
9,000rpm redline as one can manage, is just as ridiculous as you can imagine it being. Now, of course, I've sampled cars that pull way harder, from hybrid LMP1s to EV performance cars, but you grow to expect such savagery in a racing machine and harmonise with it, and EVs have none of that drama, surprise, and involvement that the Huracán possesses. By contrast, the Huracán is savagely involving without ever letting you get too comfortable with it, because once you reach fifth gear on a racetrack where it mellows out just a little bit, you'll have other "HOLY BALLSACKS" things to worry about.
Those being the brakes.
For some weird reason, even on the default and strongest ABS setting, the Huracán's front tyres will be pushed to their absolute limit under full braking, even on a dry, level, and smooth racetrack, with whatever road legal compound you fit on them persistently chirping and squealing just with the brakes alone. This of course means that the front tyres have next to nothing left to actually turn the car when the time comes, meaning that you have to come off the brakes almost entirely for this rear mid engined supercar to even start considering biting into a corner. The news isn't much better on corner exits, either, where the front tyres will lift and gasp for air as though they had been forcibly held underwater and asphyxiating the whole time, which doesn't feel too far from the truth. The braking issue might be remedied by shifting brake bias backwards towards the rear, but since a Brake Balance Controller is an aftermarket part in GT7, I don't much want to fiddle with it back here in GTS, since, you know, we're supposed to be testing cars stock.
What this all translates to is that the front tyres are always at their limits around a track, and as such, they are also the limiting factor in everything that you do. Aside from off–track whoopsies, the rear end of the car just doesn't feel alive at all, like a dead carcass just along for the ride like an FF hatch, and I never once had to apply any counter steer in my time with the Huracán. The front tyres being constantly overworked and at their limit in any situation also means that the baby bull is a very "one thing at a time" car; you're either braking or turning, not both at the same time. You're either turning or accelerating, not both at the same time. While "one thing at a time" can be great life advice for some, especially for those suffering with anxiety, it's a pretty awful ethos for a brash, shouty, hard accelerating rear mid engined supercar, for whom the pace is often set by the track and the cars around it rather than its driver. Overall, its cornering prowess, or lack thereof, feels completely disproportionate to its straight line bursts, and after a while, it just feels like I as a driver have to fight the car at literally every turn to get it to... turn.
Some might argue that the whole point of a Lamborghini is that you have to fight it a little to prove your worth as a driver, but because the Huracán never really threatens to actually kill you by spinning out or flipping over, fighting it just to get it to turn like a car ought to feels less like a testosterone filled fight to prove your worthiness against a feral beast and more annoying like trying to get your bratty kid to do their homework. I don't know about you, but if I want to feel like a disgruntled dad, I'd have bought a Honda Shuttle, not a Lamborghini Huracán.
To be entirely fair, the Huracán
can corner, it just has a lot of "safety understeer" baked into how its set up, erecting a gargantuan barrier the driver has to overcome each time they attempt to take a corner at speed with the Huracán, making everything else about the car hard to appreciate when then understeer takes priority and dominates your every thought on the racetrack. It'd be too easy to blame Lamborghini's overbearing parents, Audi, for that understeer and the perceived safety said understeer brings, but really? Lamborghinis have been understeering like a house in a landslide without anything resembling a paddle even as far back as the
25th Anniversary Countach. Plus, I took a 2009 Ferrari 458 Italia to race against the Huracán on race day, and to my utmost surprise, the two cars drive almost identically, with a nose that is wont to lift, and the entire experience dominated by "safety understeer". It's a trait that is shared with most, if not all of the modern supercars I've tested here in Car of the Week thus far, from the
2017 Ford GT to the Aston Martin Vulcan.
And so I find myself at an awkward impasse in writing this review, because I don't know what conclusion I can come to for the Huracán. I don't know if it's a good car relative to its contemporary peers or not, because they all blend together seamlessly to offer the same driving experience of "much power, such understeer, wow". It doesn't matter what engine they have, how much they weigh, what they look like, or what their drivetrain layouts are; if they all drive the same, none of them have a distinct trait or a personality of their own that set them apart from the next car. If not for my Nyan Cat livery and the real life story behind it, the Huracán would feel like a 458 clone in this game. I may not like these cars, but from an objective standpoint, are they good? Which would I recommend over the other and why? I can't answer that at all.
Fortunately, I have some friends that sometimes make my desk job easier for me... by making my job on the racetrack way harder.
Here at Car of the Week, I'm not the only one with a darling Porsche I like to whip out unsolicited at every opportunity; Vic has a dung beetle coloured
991 GT3 RS he likes to sashay around from time to time, and the last race of the day at Suzuka was one such occasion. On paper, you'd think Vic was sending his Beetle to the Slaughter: it's a whole 110HP down on the Huracán, and while normally only 2kg (4lbs) lighter than the Huracán if you can believe any statistic the Italians give you about their cars, Vic had a few more scones and Earl Greys just before the race to get his car and driver combo to meet the minimum mass requirement of 1,422kg (3,135lbs), the mass of the Huracán according to this game. Also, remember the part where I said that I consider rear mid engine all wheel drive to be the ideal drivetrain layout for a sports car? The 911's RR layout is easily the worst layout ever mass produced, putting aside forklifts. So can anyone please explain to me HOW THE HELL I got utterly destrolished and humiliated by the 991 during the "race" at Suzuka?
First, Vic gave the whole field a 5 second head start. He then overtook everyone else in the race before hunting me in my Purracan down for the lead. The whole ordeal didn't take him too long, and by the midway point of lap 2, the dung beetle was already getting a very strong whiff of the distinct odour of cat poo. He then decided to start a smoke show by drifting and sliding around, before casually overtaking me at his leisure.
So what the hell happened?
My guess is that Porsche actually made a sports car that can actually handle, when everybody else was too preoccupied with "protecting" their drivers and clientele. Porsche made a car that's meant to be driven, whereas everybody else was obsessed with making trophies on wheels. Porsche will actually let you have your car and play with it too, and they didn't even have to lie about their mass figures to beat some cheaters. Above all else, Porsche has shown me that other car makers have no excuse to not do better; they just choose not to. Armed with that context, I can now confidently tell you that the Huracán is a bad car... at least, in base LP 610-4 form.
Yes. Yes, I'm aware that it's perhaps unfair to the Huracán that we ran the base model against a track focused, hardcore 911 GT3 RS. Perhaps a Performante or an STO would've been a fairer comparison, but oh would you look at that, we only get one road going Huracán, and it's the base model.
How convenient.
Even when I actively
try to like them, Italian cars just make me mad without fail.