In which an ex-car-fanatic takes a Lamborghini Huracán for a spin

How many editors can you fit in the trunk of a Lamborghini? Watch this short clip to find out. Video shot/edited by Jennifer Hahn.

When I was in high school, I was much more interested in cars than I am at present. And back in those days, the car that grabbed the most interest was the Lamborghini Countach. At a time when most cars seemed like obvious evolutions of stuff that had been around for decades, the Lamborghini looked like it had been imported not from Italy but from a planet on the outskirts of the Orion Nebula. I lusted after it for years.

But unrequited love can only last for so long, and this one had largely faded from my consciousness. Practical urban cars with decent gas mileage have dominated my driving experience over the years.

All of this made it seem incredibly surreal when I drove my 2003 Toyota up to the anointed location to see a Lamborghini Huracán sitting there—even though the whole reason I was pulling up in the Toyota was that I knew it was going to be there. All these years later, I was going to have a first date with my high-school-era crush.

It would be a well-chaperoned date, as part of a larger group. In fact, I’d spend the vast majority of the day driving the Toyota, helping Ars’ video guru Jennifer Hahn get some action shots of the Huracán on the road, and leading Ars’ automotive expert, Jonathan Gitlin, to find some of the nicer roads in the New York City area.

But I was promised time behind the wheel, and after a long day of filming, the time arrived. The Huracán may be the budget Lamborghini at a quarter-million dollars, but it still has 10 cylinders—that’s the same number you’d get if you totalled the cylinder count of every car I’ve ever owned. I’d also been chastened by YouTube, where I’ve seen videos of idiots who underappreciated the amount of power a supercar produces, with disastrous consequences. I was not going to be one of those idiots.

Avoiding that fate involved a mental bargain with myself: I’d not drive it faster than I’d be comfortable driving the Toyota. And given I was handed the keys in Harriman State Park, where speed limits are generally 45mph, that set some hard limits on what I could do.

Kept in cruising mode (as opposed to one of the sportier settings), the Huracán got to the speed limit and beyond very quickly but then dropped into 7th gear in order to avoid draining the fuel tank instantly. This added a bit of lag to any further acceleration I asked for, caused by the transmission downshifting. The only way I could see having serious fun with the engine on normal roads is taking it from a dead stop and merging onto a freeway.

The handling was something else entirely. Harriman has a number of traffic circles, and I did more than one 540-degree trip through them. The car made it easy to maintain the speed limit through the tight circle, and a snap of the wrists popped it out of the turn without losing any of that speed. In the end, the only thing that seemed to be pushed close to its limits was the luxurious leather seat, which wanted to allow my rear end to slide right out of it. With a seat cover and time to get comfortable with the car, I have no doubt that I could have taken the turns considerably faster.

A short time later, however, I got the chance to chase the Lamborghini while driving the Toyota as Jonathan took it through a similar trip around the roundabout. Its fabric-covered seats kept me firmly in place, while the speed was clearly much closer to the car’s limits of stability (though no tires were screeching). And it was pretty fun.

This isn’t to say that revisiting my high school crush was a disappointment. I’d love to spend a few days getting used to the Lamborghini—taking it on familiar roads and figuring out how to get the most out of it without shattering the local speed limits. I’d love to get it on a very twisty track even more. But I can’t foresee any reason that would ever happen. And I’m surprisingly OK with that.

In the meantime, I can have a fair amount of fun pushing my Toyota much closer to its limits if I so desire. And I don’t have to panic about scraping its nose every time I see a speedbump.