Lamborghini Monday: Getting A Feel For the Gallardo

Ok, I ain’t gonna lie: for me, one of the biggest attractions of Lamborghini Monday was getting my Escort out on the open highway to break in my new carb. To meet our shiny new test cars, we drove to Snoqualmie, up in the mountains about a half-hour outside of Seattle. And it wasn’t long before I found there were plenty of other diversions besides Mr. Weber. More…

If you’ve never driven a Lambo, here’s the first thing you need to know: it’s way easy! The bone-stock Gallardos we drove today felt big, solid, and absolutely stable. The paddle-shifting (I’ve never tried it before now) was way more intuitive than I thought it’d be. I’m not used to driving anything that goes very fast, but I hit 130 without even really thinking about it. It’s really a car that wants to go fast, and and who are you to stand in its way? With the AWD and (I’m sure) an army of electronic nannies, that car is glued to the road—and anything under 100 feels downright sedate. It would’ve been easy to take the needle even higher, but there was traffic. And one thing I definitely learned is that if you’re being a jerk on the freeway in a Lambo, the people around you tend to behave unpredictably. You see a lot of left-lane hogs who do the guilty "oops, excuse me" lane change—at the exact moment you’re blowing by them on the right at about twice their speed. Yeah, it’s probably better to play nice until you find a strip of truly open road.

Yep, this was certainly one of the more well-behaved cars I’ve ever driven. Even on some unpopulated twisty two-lane blacktop, at some pretty burly speeds, the Gallardo gives you the sense that you’re not even close to pushing it. It’s like it’s saying, "try me."