Lamborghini Gallardo LP 560-4 Driven: Taming the Bull

What happens when you get the opportunity to drive a Lamborghini Gallardo LP 560-4 at a race track? Muntaser Mirkar was in Chennai to look for the answer...

Five Hundred and Sixty PS of power at the disposal of your right foot. What do you do - sit around and admire the interiors, step out and drool over the low slung slippery wedge of its body or simply walk away? No. You thumb the starter and listen in awe as the deep gurgle of the 90-degree V10 roars to life in a high pitch and settles into the constant rumble of thunder on the horizon. Your heart beats faster and faster as you realize what you're about to do next. Your brain sends distraught signals to every part of your body as your spine tingles with excitement - a cold shiver running down your back in anticipation of things to come. Your eyes dance around scanning the view ahead from the raked windscreen. Your hands grip its chunky steering wheel as you get set to take your first drive on this maddening conclusion of science, technology and metal all supervised by that purest of human emotions - passion. You engage first gear with a quick flick of the slender lever mounted on the steering stalk and you wait. You take a deep breath, close your eyes and revel in every event in your life that has led you to exist in this very moment that you are in - sitting at the driver's seat of not just any car, but the insane Lamborghini Gallardo LP 560-4

The Gallardo has been Lamborghini's smallest and most produced model ever since it first debuted in 2003. In all these years, time has failed to ravage the simplistic beauty of this most desired of sports cars and it yet remains a gorgeous vehicle - even if that is an understatement to its timeless demeanour. All the way from 2003 the Gallardo has undergone a range of concepts and upgrades including the Special Edition 'SE', Nera, Superleggera, Super Trofeo, LP 550-2 Valentino Balboni and the car that you see on this page - the LP 560-4. The baby Lambo may look timid but quite aptly lives up to the breed of fighting bull where it borrows its name from. But the secret behind the speciality of the LP 560-4 lies in that suffix where LP stands for 'Longitudinale Posteiore' which signifies the longitudinal mid-ship layout of the engine while the 560-4 stand for numbers that are mind blowing in nature. The 5.2 litre V10 in the Gallardo's bay puts out all of 560 PS of power at 8000rpm and directs all of those horses to all four wheels in a 70:30 split favouring the rear end.

With all that in perspective, there's only one place in India where you can truly enjoy the true characteristics of the Gallardo LP 560-4's existence - on a race track like the Madras Motor Sports Club's circuit in Chennai, and that?s exactly where we tamed this bull. Dabbing the right foot to hear the massive V10 work its grand opera is enough to intimidate you into respecting the car. And if that's not enough, the slow rocking of the car under the influence of 540 Nm of torque will surely have your hair standing on the back of your neck - and that's even before you let go of the brakes and start rolling forward. Rolling slowly out of the narrow pitlane onto the track just after Turn 1 has never been a better experience as you get pinned all the way to the back of your seat when you floor the LP 560-4s throttle, all the way to the stop if you have the courage to! With a 0-100 km/h time of 3.7 seconds, the car accelerates hard and crosses double that figure in just 11.8 seconds - from standstill! It will keep accelerating and touch a top whack of a whopping 325 km/h!