Lamborghini unveiled its latest car to wear the knife-edged Performante badge, applying the Performante's formula of lightweighting, bumped power, and track-day cred to... an SUV? Yes indeed, the new Performante is an iteration on the world's Lamborghiniest SUV, the Urus. The obvious question here, and the one I heard asked 'round the Lamborghini stand at The Quail after the car's reveal, was simply, "why?"
We put the question (and a few others) to Lamborghini's chief technical officer Rouven Mohr. His response to the masses: Because we're Lamborghini, you fools! (my words, not his). Mohr said plans for a faster, more-capable, even track-day-curious Urus were laid long ago. The Urus Performante was inevitable, in other words. (For more of a nuts-and-bolts backgrounder on the car, check out our into piece here).
"I mean, to be honest, we already had this idea some years ago," Mohr said, gesturing at the car. "We knew from the beginning that we wanted to focus more on the driving, on fun. This is the perfect car for those who love the Urus, but are more driver-oriented."
When it launched, the very idea of a Lamborghini SUV was ridiculed. In some ways, I understood the uproar; Lamborghini chased profits plainly, breaking from more than a half-century of wedge-shaped tradition; It built not only its first production vehicle with four doors but an SUV (don't mention the LM-002, which was a military vehicle from the outset, unless you'd like to talk about the Dakar-prepped LM002 Evoluzione which was a proper batshit Rambo Lambo).
But then, Lamborghini started as a tractor company. Why shouldn't it cash in on the fast SUV craze? So long as the low-slung wedges keep rolling out of the factory in droves, I can't fault Lambo for chasing the financial security that eluded them for decades before the Audi takeover. A "compromised" Lamborghini is better than no Lamborghini, and I want to keep driving Huracans that look like origami Murder Hornets and make my eardrums quiver.
Mohr insists there's still Lamborghini integrity swimming in the Urus Performante's blood, a brash character maintained in its wild form, even if that form is lifted two feet off the ground. I ask about the impossible task of balancing the utility we expect from the SUV form factor and the brash absurdity of a raging bull.
"Some people will use the Performante on the track, but it's not a track tool. So, therefore, let me say the daily usability and also the remaining comfort has to be quite good to drive on the public road. For instance, we didn't choose to save the last percentage of weight. We still have the active calibration and bandwidth in the suspension."
That balance between comfort and performance was a running theme of the conversation, with the aforementioned suspension calibration critical to nailing the Performante formula. Lamborghini chucked the standard Urus's air suspension in favor of a static setup with simple steel springs and adjustable dampers. Rather than a de-contented Urus, Mohr said the more-traditional suspension arrangement works more reliably during hard road driving and at the race track.
Lamborghini didn't stop at suspension tweaks, working over the Urus's body, engine calibration, and experiential elements.
"Another thing, for instance, we reduced the insulation of the car so the sound is even more perceivable. But it's still on the level that you can also, if you're driving in Strada (the Urus's roadgoing driving mode) for 200 miles, it's also not annoying, you know? Because the Urus is also a long-distance car," Mohr said.
Again: balance. But shouldn't a Performante badge tip the scales more radically in favor of a raw edge, of outright performance? Mohr contends it does.
"Well I can tell you that this car, the Performante, is faster on our internal test track than the first generation of the Huracan," Mohr said. "I mean, it's a car that is so incredibly fast. Yeah. That gives you, as an engineer, a kind of proudness as to what the car and its systems are able to do."
But the real answer to the inciting questioncropped up later in the conversation. Lamborghini builds an Urus Performante because its customers want them, full stop. Lamborghini knows its customers enough to anticipate that demand early in its product design cycle. If you're one of the commentariat warriors railing against the Urus, well, you're probably not shopping for Lamborghinis.
"The customers always appreciate if we have something more radical," Mohr said. "And therefore we decide, okay, why not also to do this in the Urus? Because as a manufacturer, you have to listen carefully to the customers. You have to think one step ahead. Because otherwise, you're always too late."