ORANGE COUNTY, California — There’s something about a supercar that is deeply enthralling. This is particularly true when that supercar is a Lamborghini Huracán painted in an outrageous matte purple called “Viola Mel.”
There’s much more to a supercar than the price, but let’s get that out of the way up front: My test car stickers for an honestly-quite-reasonable $278,516 after it was fitted with $66,250 worth of optional extras and an eye-watering $3,695 destination charge.
Much like the Rolls-Royce Ghost I reviewed last week, the question of whether its “worth it” is entirely up to the potential buyer. Specifically whether or not they A) want a Lamborghini Huracán EVO RWD; and B) have $278,516 to spend on a wildly impractical 610-horsepower sports car. If the answers to both are true, then yes, it’s worth it.
But first, the basics: Getting in the Huracán isn’t easy. And I don’t just mean coming up with a house worth of cash to buy one — I mean literally climbing in. I had to teach a few people how to do it and it goes something like this: Open door; put one foot inside the footwell; set butt on the door sill; slide butt into seat; bring other foot into footwell; close door. To leave, reverse it.
It’s not an elegant process and doing it in anything remotely approaching a dignified manner is tricky. But, if you do it right, your car will be painted in that Viola Mel color and folks won’t be paying any attention to your haphazard attempts to not fall over when exiting the car because they’ll be too busy falling in love with the paint. That’s a $16,500 paint job by the way, courtesy of Lamborghini’s Ad Personam customization program and words fail when trying to describe how good it looks in person.
It looks so magnificent that people think it’s fake. I brought it to the weekly South OC Cars and Coffee event — ostensibly it’s an impromptu car show for all manner of car enthusiasts, but an awful lot of Lambo drivers show up to show off. There were at least ten Huracáns in attendance, including a spyder in what a Porsche enthusiast would call Miami Blue — but none garnered as much attention as my Viola Mel.
This is what owning a supercar (or borrowing one for the weekend, in my case) is all about. Except the paint job was so outrageously unique that nearly everyone thought it was a really good wrap, or temporary vinyl covering. It costs a lot of money to have Lamborghini paint their car in such a way that it convinces people that you put a wrap on your car. And then you get to explain that no, it’s not a wrap, it’s paint and here let me show you this sticker under the hood that proves it’s an original factory paint job. There aren’t many cars that could get me going about the paint for hundreds of words, but here we are.
This was my second Huracán, and the first was wildly uncomfortable. A friend that I gave a ride to still talks about how awful it was, and that was five years ago. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the car or because of the seats — but it was a little bit of both. That one had the most hardcore racing seats Lambo offers fitted to it, while this one has the mid-tier Sport Seat ($7,500). They’re fairly comfortable, as sports car seats go, and are manually adjustable which is good for racing but I might skip them and get the “base” comfort seats instead unless you’re going racing, in which case go for the uncomfortable race chairs.
Enough about the look; now on to that 610-horsepower V10. I’m not usually one to get emotional about the good old days, but there is something really special about a giant naturally aspirated engine that’s going to be lost from the world soon due to new engine and fuel economy regulations, not to mention the advancement of technology.
The engine fires up with a ferocious bark that rattles the soul like a bolt of lightning and happily revs to terrifying heights with the slightest twitch of the throttle. The start button, hidden beneath an absurdly wonderful red missile-launcher-esque protective cover, might as well inject dopamine directly into your brain in such prodigious amounts as to make you forget about the pandemic, the fact that Trump isn’t President or that he ever was (your choice), and that Tom Brady has seven Super Bowl rings and you don’t.
And that’s before you aim that Viola Mel nose at the nearest interstate on-ramp and punch it, Chewie.
Troubles forgotten. Smile affixed. Life ain’t so bad.
At least until you have to slow down because you’re well into triple digits and you haven’t even merged onto the highway yet. Still. It’s a good day.
