The Lamborghini Huracán Tecnica Is Not a Supercar

"I can't believe we forgot to invite Lamborghini," my coworkers laughed, standing next to an eye-searingly orange Lamborghini Huracán Tecnica, a car that we very much did invite to the 2023 Performance Car of the Year. This was my first time at the test, I'd never driven a Lamborghini, and I was just starting to get the joke.

Welcome to the run-up to Performance Car of the Year 2023. This year we’ll be running breakout stories on each of our 10 contenders twice a week, every week until the full all-out comparison goes live the third week of January. Let's get into it.

Every time it came to swap keys around, everyone gravitated towards a few very new cars, cars that we absolutely had to drive. There was a new Z06. There was a new Civic Type R. There was a new AWD Toyota turbo hatch nobody had tried, and a Porsche Cayman GT4RS that had everyone reeling as they got out of it. It was perhaps more important to my fellow road testers that these cars were really new than they were necessarily good or bad to drive. They were curious.

Nobody was all that curious about the Lamborghini. That made sense; the Huracán has been around since 2014, the facelifted version since 2019, and while the Huracán Tecnica is new for 2022 it is mostly a road-friendly re-tune of the Huracán STO that they all drove in 2021. Not me, though. I'd never driven a Lamborghini. I, myself, was overflowing with curiosity, and I eagerly leapt behind the wheel the moment the opportunity presented itself.

Before I get too deep into what the car was like on the road, let me present the specs. It starts at $245,295. It weighs 3018 pounds dry. Its 5.2-liter V-10 revs to 9000 RPM and delivers 631 hp and 417 lb-ft of torque along the way. The chassis is a mixture of carbon fiber and aluminum first riveted and then glued together. The transmission is a seven-speed dual-clutch auto. It looks like a particularly futuristic wedge of cheese.

In many ways, the Tecnica is a more old-school driver's car than its avant-garde looks and digital dash would have you believe. The V-10 is naturally-aspirated not turbocharged. The steering is a fixed ratio. The big wing and scoop of the STO are gone. The suspension is chilled out for road not track.

In other aspects, the Tecnica is still very much a modern automotive product, a more-is-more kind of vehicle. It has all-wheel drive and all-wheel steering. The suspension, traction control, torque vectoring, and even pedal response all change based on its three selectable drive modes.

I stepped out of the thing short of breath, throat raspy. Alone in the car, I had been screaming. Screaming because of the force it accelerated down a straight. Screaming because of how violently bumps and rough spots in the road deflected the car. Screaming just to match the volume of the V-10, filling the cabin with a wall of sound.