Race a Lamborghini Huracan STO in the rain? Get a grip

Sure, it’s not very manly to be afraid of rain, and I’m not proud of myself, but I feel I must be fully honest with the several million people who read this column.

Lamborghini Huracan STO. Picture: supplied

Sure, it’s not very manly to be afraid of rain, and I’m not proud of myself, but I feel I must be fully honest with the several million people who read this column and admit that I was sniffling scared as the broody black clouds gathered above the Phillip Island race circuit and duly delivered a deluge.

It can be fun driving a car on a race track in the rain. I remember giggling my way around at the launch of a fizzing Renault Sport Clio some years ago, unconcerned that I would ever really go fast enough to hurt myself and confident that when things go wrong in a front-wheel-drive car it’s quite gradual, even amusing. When I inevitably ended up in a gravel trap, I was still smiling.

Today, though, we’d come to drive a car that looks like it eats sharks for breakfast, a machine both mad and malevolent – the Lamborghini Huracan STO. You might think it looks wild on the outside, but from the driver’s seat the rear-view mirror offers up a view that makes you feel like you’re inside a xenomorph from Alien. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it has acid in its innards instead of oil.

What I like about Lamborghinis in general is that they’re a bit sensible, which seems counterintuitive when you consider they have enormously powerful engines and exhausts that seem designed to damage the hearing of someone who’s already deaf. What I mean is that they are usually all-wheel drive, which gives you a 50 per cent better chance of getting their prodigious power to the ground without the rear of the car attempting to dance like Shakira.

They’re also a wondrous marriage of Italian passion and performance with Teutonic engineering, because there’s a little bit of Audi in them, at least since Lamborghini was bought by the Germans back in 1998.

Lamborghini Huracan STO. Picture: Supplied

This STO, however, is to sensible what Donald Trump is to politics. It is an attempt to turn the company’s rear-wheel-drive GT3 track car – normally piloted by those supra humans known as racing drivers – into something that regular people can buy and drive on the road (as long as they’re not fond of the structural integrity of their spines).

Consider this: around the famous Daytona circuit in Florida, the GT3, on slick tyres, manages a time of 1 minute 45 seconds, while the STO does it in 1.48, on road-legal tyres. Lots of vehicles claim to be “a race car for the road”, but this thing really is, and that makes it extremely intimidating.

Race cars are rock hard and riotously loud – the STO’s interior is entirely carbon fibre, which includes the floor mats, so that even when you plonk your feet down there’s no give, just the impression of brutality and seriousness, which you also get from the fact that the door handles were considered too heavy and have been replaced by cloth pull loops. Even the windscreen has been “lightened”.

Weight reduction – which gets the STO down to an impressive 1339kg – was obviously a focus of the car’s development team, then, which might make the uninitiated wonder why the suspension seems to be made of concrete.

Race tracks don’t have big bumps, gutters or potholes, so suspension travel is unnecessary; the suspension’s job is simply to connect you directly with the road, which this Lambo’s surely does, or would, if there wasn’t a scary sheen of water all over it.

For my first few laps it was raining, which truly turned the accelerator of this rear-wheel-drive, 470kW V10 violence machine into a throttle – because each time I pressed it I swear I stopped breathing.

When a car this sharp goes sideways, it happens very fast indeed, and despite driving the STO in its “Pioggia” (Rain) mode, and being as careful as a kitten creeping across a sleeping Rottweiler, it just kept happening to me.

What I did get to fully appreciate, however, was how good this Lambo’s race-spec brakes are. I would hit them, in panic, and end up fully stopped before I got to a corner, looking like a right idiot.

Lambos on the Phillip Island circuit. Picture: supplied

Fortunately, wondrously, the rain eased off in the afternoon, and with an almost dry line emerging on the Phillip Island circuit I managed to breast 250km/h down the straight and feel the force of the car’s impressive aero (more than 400kg of downforce at that speed) shoving me into the track and giving me the confidence to actually attack some of the drier bends.

Unfortunately, some parts of the track were still damp enough to provide near-death experiences, but I did get to at least partly appreciate what an astonishingly agile, accelerative and deafening weapon the STO would be in the right conditions. Everything about it, from its steering to its shift paddles, is so sharp you need to check your hands when you get out to see if you’re bleeding.

Lamborghini says there are plenty of buyers willing to part with $596,000 for the Huracan STO, “customers who like to drive like a pilot, or a pro driver”, and I’m sure those lucky punters will enjoy their track days enormously, at least when it doesn’t rain.

As far as driving one on the road goes, I wish them luck, because I imagine it’s going to feel like piloting a rocket powered dinner tray down a set of stairs.

Lamborghini Huracan STO

ENGINE: 5.2-litre V10 (470kW/565Nm)

FUEL ECONOMY: 14 litres per 100km

TRANSMISSION: 7-speed dual-clutch automatic, rear-wheel drive

PRICE: $596,000

RATING: ★★★★