We're fresh from the heart of the Lamborghini headquarters in Sant'Agata Bolognese, Italy, where Italian and German executives have been beaming like proud papas in front of their soon-to-debut Huracán LP 610-4. The successor to the ultra-successful Lamborghini Gallardo will have its coming out party at the Geneva Motor Show next week, but there's no need to wait any longer for the details of this hotly anticipated model.
We, like many of you, have of course seen the Huracán in photos and videos before now, but it's safe to say the that the car makes a far stronger impact in the metal than it does in pixels. While the bodywork doesn't lack for the kind of metal origami that made the Gallardo so attractive, the Huracán contrasts areas of soft curvature against hard lines to great effect. We're comfortable ranking the new Lambo with a score of "Monica Bellucci" on the scale of Italian hotness (for those grading at home, that's just one below "Sophia Loren")
Designer Filippo Perini described the overarching hexagonal theme to the design details, pointing out that even the shape of the bodywork around the windows (which he referred to as the "Egyptian Eye") was penned with six sides. Continue to look at images of the Huracán and you'll see hexagons inside and out, with the interior especially bedecked with similarly shaped accents. The bodywork functions as well as it attracts, too, with a three-percent reduction of drag versus Gallardo and a whopping fifty-percent increase in downforce – all without using active aerodynamics, we should
point out
As we alluded to earlier, the Huracán is also set to make use of Lambo's new ANIMA management software. The Italian word for "soul" is also an acronym for Adaptive Network Intelligent MAnagement (future trivia question), and offers driver selectable modes that alter steering effort and response, transmission and engine mapping, all-wheel-drive systems and the magnetorheological dampers. Set to the race-ready Corsa mode, ANIMA helped the Huracán lap the Nardo circuit some two seconds quicker than a Gallardo LP 560-4 (and Lamborghini's test driver considers that gap to be very conservative)..
n terms of sales figures, but the company fully believes Huracán will eclipse it on that front. With over 700 cars pre-sold already, Lamborghini seems confident that it could best the Gallardo's one-year sales record of 1,844 deliveries in 2008. Execs see more than 1,000 units in 2014 as an easy target, with first shipments starting just after June in all markets. We still don't know what the starting price of the car will be in North America, but European buyers will be looking at a base cost of 201,000 euros – around $275,000 USD – which ought to add a whole lot of cheddar for Lamborghini and the Audi group.
