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Dad Invites Lamborghini Owners To Son's Birthday Party

The resulting unalloyed joy, as you'll see in the footage below, is priceless. One of my defining moments as a budding car enthusiast came the first time I got to see a Lamborghini up close. I was out in Los Angeles visiting a relative with my mother and sister, and I took the change of scenery as an opportunity to look for more exotic cars than my middle-class Midwestern upbringing would usually encounter. We were on a walk, when off in the distance I saw – and heard – something extraordinary: An early '80s Lamborghini Countach, black with those bronze five-hole wheels, pulling into a parking spot. My mom still takes great joy in periodically retelling the events of that day, and as the story goes, I joyfully took off without warning, chasing the car down the street shouting "Lamborghini!" "Lamborghini!!" in my best eight-year-old Italian accent. I must've still been adorable, because the owner not only let me sit in his car, scissor door open and ridiculous grin on my face, he left me playing around in its interior, nonchalantly telling me to shut the door when I was done. Just like that, he left, disappearing into a shop across the street. I can't tell you how long I sat in the car, or how many photos I demanded my mother take of me with my borrowed Bell and Howell, but I can remember being astounded at how low it was – I could crouch as if sitting on the bumper and still see over it! That was around 30 years ago, and I still have a couple of those dog-eared pictures. Funnily enough, my memorable Lamborghini encounter is pretty similar to that of the young boy featured in this video. At age seven, however, Jacob is clearly ahead of the curve. As the story goes, his father left a message on Lamborghini Los Angeles North's Facebook page, asking if someone with "a kind heart" would help him help make his Lamborghini-fanatic child's birthday wish come true. And "come true" it did, with the dealership helping organize not just a ride-along in an Aventador, but also a small cavalcade of other Lambos, all of which all showed up unannounced at his house on Jacob's birthday. The resulting unalloyed joy, as you'll see in the footage below, is priceless. As car enthusiasts, most of us have been lucky enough to have memorable defining car experiences, those fleeting moments in our personal back catalogs that have come to mean so much more than they first appeared to be.

Anything but subtle | 2017 Lamborghini Aventador S First Drive

It's just past dawn and I'm running on a thin supply of caffeine and adrenaline, but the 2017 Lamborghini Aventador S I'm chasing around Circuit Ricardo Tormo just made me crack a grin: faint blue flames are simmering deep within the leader's three exhaust pipes, pulsing almost imperceptibly as it whips around the track. Few things about the Lamborghini Aventador LP700-4 (including its alphanumeric name) were subtle, but the boys in Sant'Agata Bolognese have gone full-bore at refining the famously unwieldy flagship enough to make it drive as capably as it looks. This updated version has been rechristened with an S at the end of its name, and yes, in the twisted microcosm of earthbound fighter jets, flames coming out of hindquarters qualify as subtle. Of course the Aventador S produces more power – to the tune of 729 horsepower, a 38-hp climb from before, with torque only increasing by one, to 509 pound-feet – and the extra grunt affects neither its 0-to-62-mph time of 2.9 seconds nor its terminal velocity of 217 mph. But version 2.0's most notable improvements apply to the big Lamborghini's chassis, which now uses a four-wheel-steering system to countersteer the rear wheels below around 75 mph, and turn them in phase with the fronts for stability at higher speeds. The system responds in 5 milliseconds, and has the virtual effect of shortening the wheelbase by up to 20 inches or lengthening it by 27 inches. In case you're keeping tabs, the extra 13 pounds of the steering hardware are offset by a new titanium exhaust system, essentially rendering the curb weight unchanged. If you've ever tried to toss a boomerang through a maze, you've got a basic idea of what it took to carry an original Aventador through a high-speed corner. The act required some patience to allow the front wheels to dig in and take hold, and even more resolve to wait for the perfect moment to squeeze the right pedal and power out of the apex. Accelerate too early, and you'd suffer terminal understeer until you allowed the weight to shift, likely triggering traction control as you goosed the throttle on the way out. At the Spanish track, the new Aventador manages something the first one couldn't: though it still retains some understeer, it also dances and turns more willingly, snaking its way through each corner with a gratifying combination of weight transfer and grip. Oh happy, fire-breathing day.

The Huracan Performante is still a supercar steal, regardless of 'Ring time validity

When Lamborghini released video of its new Huracan Performante lapping the Nurburgring in a stunning 6:52, not everyone was convinced the record was honest. As a result, Lamborghini's director of research and development provided some data to Roadshow to shore up the lap time claim. He addressed the tire issue by telling Roadshow that the car used the optional Pirelli Trofeo Rs. And he noted that it was quicker than its more powerful brother, the Aventador SV, because it cornered and accelerated faster. He even provided VBox data of the lap. The thing is, none of this really matters in the end, particularly for the Huracan. Let us explain. For one thing, if you're going to question the Performante's time, you should question all of the times. All of these records are presented by the manufacturers, so there isn't a truly impartial party measuring the results and inspecting cars. Even with a company presenting plenty of data and explanations, it's hard to be 100 percent sure everything is on the level without an unbiased third party inspecting the cars before and after the lap, and keeping timing. But besides the issue of impartiality, the times themselves aren't really important. As interesting and fun as it is to compare lap times at the Nurburgring, they're really only relevant for rich owners and car companies to brag, and for less-rich fans to bench race. That's not a bad thing, but to look at the lap time of one single track doesn't really give a full picture of a car's performance. A car that's fast at the Nurburgring could be really slow on a tight course like Streets of Willow Springs. There's also the issue of who's driving the car. The manufacturers put their top drivers out on the 'Ring to set times. If you're not a factory test driver, you'll probably never go that fast even if you did get your car to the track. It's all a bit like the silly "blind" or two-wheeled car records. They don't actually provide much info on what the car is really like, or how you could drive it. Even if you're not on board with this explanation, and trust all the 'Ring records except this Lamborghini, we still have a reason why it doesn't matter. You see, even if you're convinced that there's no way the Huracan could best the Porsche 918 Spyder and the Aventador around the Nordschleife, it's still a screaming supercar bargain. The Porsche is a million-dollar car, and the Aventador, just the base model, is $125,000 more than the Huracan Performante.