Michael Taylor•3 Mar 2014

NEWS

GENEVA MOTOR SHOW: Lamborghini Huracan blows in

Can Lambo's latest fill the vacuum left by the iconic Gallardo?

Pioneering chassis technology, trick sensors, more power and finally a modern gearbox, but is the Lamborghini Huracan enough to replace the most successful car in Raging Bull history?

Lamborghini teased us with hints that the replacement for its Gallardo might be an evolutionary change, but in reality the supercar manufacturer is set to stun the Geneva Motor Show with a stiff, fast, soft-riding Huracan that is nothing less than a revolution.

The sheer scale of the technical advances in the Huracan belie its evolutionary, but aggressive exterior design, becoming the first car in history to carry a volume production hybrid chassis of carbon-fibre and aluminium.

The mid-engined supercar is 50 per cent stiffer than the Gallardo thanks largely to building its most torsionally critical area – the entire rear wall, separating the passenger compartment from the engine bay and the transmission tunnel – out of carbon-fibre. Lamborghini has employed less-expensive aluminium for the rest of the structure.

The only piece of relatively conservative engineering in the entire Huracan is its engine, which is a development of the Gallardo’s 5.2-litre, naturally aspirated V10, but now developing 449kW of power and 560Nm of torque. That’s up 50 horsepower on the standard version of the Gallardo and, while Ferrari is taking the lower-revving turbocharged route, the Huracan’s power peaks at a hard-spinning 8250rpm.

Its torque peaks at 560Nm, arriving at 6500rpm – although Lamborghini insists 75 per cent of that arrives from just 1000rpm, thanks to a combination of multi-point fuel injection at low-to-middling revs and direct fuel injection taking over at higher revs.

It’s enough, Lamborghini insists, to throw the Huracan to 100km/h in just 3.2 seconds (or half a second faster than the stock Gallardo LP560-4) and from 0- 200km/h in 9.9 seconds on the way to a top speed of “somewhere beyond” 325km/h.

It helps that the Huracan, in stock form, weighs only 1422kg, leading to a power to weight ratio of just 2.3kg per horsepower. And with all of its new internal developments, the weight is aided by a core body-in-white that’s 10 per cent lighter than the Gallardo’s.

But raw speed isn’t the critical part of the Huracan’s development, with Lamborghini boss Stephan Winkelmann insisting he briefed the engineering team to deliver a car that was a lot more comfortable and easy to drive on the street than the Gallardo while pounding in a lot more pace on the track.

“We wanted a redefinition of the supercar. We wanted a car that was easy and comfortable to drive on the roads and absolutely the highest performance on the tracks. And we wanted to bring innovative technology and absolute performance,” Winkelmann insisted.

“It will be a milestone within Lamborghini’s history.”

With that in mind, Lamborghini has tackled many of the areas where the 10-year-old Gallardo had fallen behind rivals from a younger generation, like the Ferrari 458 and the McLaren 12C. It has an entirely new all-wheel drive system to replace the old viscous coupling unit and a revolutionary new electronic sensor system that makes fast driving easier.

It uses start-stop technology and is the first dry-sumped car to use cylinder deactivation (though not on the initial US cars) to pull the emissions down 11 per cent to 290g/km and NEDC consumption of 12.5L/100km. And there’s an 80-litre fuel tank.

There are also standard carbon-ceramic brakes, which stop the car in just 31.9 metres from 100km/h. The 380mm front discs are clamped by six-piston monobloc calipers, while the 366mm rear discs use four-piston calipers. The tyres, meanwhile, were custom-developed with Pirelli and measure 245/30 R20 at the front and 305/30 R20 at the rear.

The arrival of a seven-speed dual-clutch transmission should mean the end of the clunky, low-speed behaviour from the Gallardo’s old six-speed, electronically controlled e.gear, but it also spells the demise of the open-gate, manual gearbox from the entire Lamborghini catalogue. Lamborghini boss, Stephan Winkelmann, said the demand for manual shifting was less than a single per cent.

Lamborghini Research and Development boss, Maurizio Reggiani, was perhaps proudest of the car’s Piattaforma Inerziale (Inertial Platform), which basically governs all of the car’s dynamic electronics systems.

With three gyroscopes and three accelerometers along the line of the car’s roll centre, it allows the central computers of each Huracan to precisely and quickly measure the exact position of every wheel and every body part at any given time.

“It calculates in real time the entire car,” Reggiani said.

“With chassis control systems today, it’s all about calculations, and calculations are time, and time works against you.

“In the way of the Piattaforma Inerziale, we are able to give the input to the steering and the suspension and the engine and gearbox to have the best result a lot faster.

“The car is able to react faster to every demand and every condition.”

Along with the new system, which links directly to the car’s skid and traction control, its throttle control, its gearbox systems and its steering, the car has a host of other new developments.

It works closely with the Huracan’s new ANIMA system (Adaptive Network Intelligent Management, but “Anima” is also Italian for “Soul”), which controls the Strada, Sport and Corsa driving modes from a switch on the bottom spoke of the steering wheel.

It also ties in to the Huracan’s electronic steering system which is, unfortunately, optional but is capable of fully variable steering inputs, with a track-mode turn moving the front wheels further than a street-mode turn.

“The tyre travel between the Strada and Corsa modes are very different,” said Reggiani.

“It means our customers can choose the system depending on the way they are using the car at any time. It can be easy to park or more precise as you go faster.

“It’s the first application of this kind of concept in a super sports car.”

There are good reasons for this, with some customers, especially the first-time Lamborghini customers, commenting on the Gallardo’s steering efforts at low speed.

“When you’re driving on a track, the really important thing is the first 20 degrees of the steering,” Lamborghini’s chief test engineer, Giorgio Sanna, insisted.

“We have worked to find the ultimate way to deliver the first 20 degrees. The ratio can be changed by the steering reactions.”

Sanna also confirmed that the Huracan would follow the Aventador’s handling profiles through its three modes.

“In Strada mode, with the stability control turned off, it’s a bit more power oversteer, as it is on the Aventador. In Sport it’s a bit more power understeer and in Corsa mode it just finds traction everywhere.”

Its job in finding that traction, which helps it to lap the 5.2km handling circuit at Lamborghini’s favoured proving ground in Nardo, Italy, more than two seconds faster than the LP560-4, is aided by a sharp new all-wheel drive system.

Lighter and more reactive than the old viscous-coupling unit, the Haldex V-based all-wheel drive is fully electronically controlled.

“We have a normal torque distribution that is nominally 30:70 front-to-rear, but it’s never that way for any time,” Reggiani explained.

“We are able to transfer 50 per cent of the torque to the front and 100 per cent to the rear. In some extreme conditions it can be like a rear-wheel drive.”

Or, as test pilot Sanna insists: “It’s much more active and it’s much more reactive, too. We can play with the gas and if there’s grip, you’ll find it.”

Another of the new, key pieces to the Huracan puzzle to find their way onto the options list are its Magneto-Rheological dampers, which are also set to find their way onto the bigger Aventador in 2015.

“Customers again can customise the reaction of the car,” Mr Reggiani said. “If the street is really bad you can have a smooth behaviour, or more dynamic behaviour on a different road or on the track with a firmer ride.”

While the dampers are highly advanced, there was insufficient demand for the Aventador’s pushrod suspension, even though Dr Hackenberg admitted it could be made to fit at the front of the Huracan’s passenger compartment. The car instead receives double wishbones at each corner.

Inside, the Huracan gets a full TFT instrument screen that, at 12.3-inches, is one of the largest in production today.

As well as doing the digital version of the normal instrument cluster, the screen takes over from the Gallardo’s centre-mounted navigation screen and drivers can switch between having a full tachometer and speedometer to having a small version of the nav screen share space with the tacho or simply having a full nav screen. The screen also changes colour, depending on the drive mode chosen in the ANIMA system.

The indicators have also migrated onto a button on the left spoke of the steering wheel, while the wipers occupy the right spoke and electrically operated seats host the occupants.

Only 1165mm high, the low-slung Huracan is, at 1924mm wide, almost as wide as an Audi A8, though its 4459mm length puts it in the A3 five-door’s length class.

“From 2003 to 2013, we sold more than 20,000 cars at an average of more than 1800 cars a year” Lamborghini President Stephan Winkelmann said.

“In the last 10 years we have sold twice as much as the first 40 years and we sold more than 1000 V12s last year for the first time in our history.

“The Gallardo was responsible for almost half of what was ever sold to customers in the history of Lamborghini.

“We already have 1000 sales for the Huracan, but we won’t be rushing the ramp up. We want to make sure we get them right from the start, so we will take our time.”

Lamborghini Huracan specifications

Type: Mid-engined sports car

Body: Two-door coupe

Seats: Two

Chassis: Carbon-fibre/spaceframe aluminium hybrid

Weight (dry): 1422kg

Engine: mid-mounted, longitudinal V10, direct and indirect fuel injection, variable valve timing, cylinder deactivation, dry sumping

Power: 449kW @ 8250rpm

Torque: 560Nm @ 6500rpm

Bore x stroke: 84.5mm x 92.8mm

Capacity: 5204cc

Compression ratio: 12.7:1